Google Cloud Billing Reimbursement via Donations?

[Hauke Mehrtens]

On 8/10/23 19:57, Daniel Pono Takamori wrote:
> 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.

+1

We should reimburse Paul the money Google cloud deduced from his account.

Hauke