Google Cloud Billing Reimbursement via Donations?

[Daniel Pono Takamori]

Sorry for top posting but I did read through all the replies so far :)

On Wed, Aug 02, 2023 at 10:52:16PM +0200, Paul Spooren wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I’m a bit in a pickle. Some time ago I applied to multiple cloud providers to improve our CI and we received 10k$ from Azure (Buildbots), Google Cloud (CI Cache) and Digital Ocean (general Infra). It all went great and quiet so far, up until yesterday where Google booked 1.8k$ from my private credit card.
> 
> Turns out the CI cache worked excellent by greatly reducing job times, however also using 94TB of bandwidth per month. The bill thereby boils down to some 16$ for storage capacity and around 1.8k$ for bandwidth.

How long a period was this? And not to preemptively try to solve a problem,
but are there options for caching any of those CI resources so it doesn't
have to fetch external resources so much (I'm assuming this was mostly
incoming bandwidth but am not sure).
 
> Asking both the billing team and the open source team from Google for further sponsoring and a refund, neither "can do anything”. Their funding got “significantly reduced” so no new credits will be available. I disabled all Google Cloud products used by OpenWrt.
> 
> A bit unfortunate that I didn’t keep closer track of the credit usage, to be fair I neither expected 94TB/m usage nor that price tag for it. Their support quote on that:
> 
> > Please keep in mind that they [credits] will expire in 12 months and there will be no notifications when credits are low, so you would have to manually check the remaining balance every once in a while.  

Ugh, this is so annoying. We've seen this problem with free credits, where
free isn't really free for very long.
 
> I wonder if the project minds using some of our SFC donations to refund that bill. It’s not breaking my neck but blowing away nearly 2k$ for CI cache for an open source project I work for is a bit… much.
> 
> tl;dr: can we use OpenWrt donations to pay a big cloud bill?

Yes, this is definitely a proper use of funds. We can do a reimbursement
(with receipts), and then maybe it's worth moving this to my SFC credit
card. I don't think we have a login for the OpenWrt Google account, but
softwarefreedomconservancy at gmail.com is our Google account that would need
billing or admin level access.

We will need a vote to authorize reimbursement funds, but seems like a
vote in the affirmative won't be a problem. So if Hauke and Jo-Philipp
(as I saw John's +1 elsewhere) could give a +1 I can follow up with Paul
about next steps.

Best,
-Pono
 
> Sunshine,
> Paul
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