Google killed my $1M ARR startup overnight
Two days ago I had a working company. $1M ARR, 100k users, a product people actually pay for and depend on. Right now it's dead in the water and I'm locked out of all of it, because Google decided to suspend my entire account.
Someone got hold of one of my API keys and ran up charges on Google's AI services that I never touched. $4,200 hit my card for usage that wasn't mine. Fine, happens I paid the bill. But Google suspended my whole project. Everything lived in there. The backend, and every single customer photo, over a million of them.
So now my users open the app and nothing loads. I can't fix it because I can't even get into the console anymore, they took that away too.
I've spent two days appealing, paying for support just to reach a real human, getting "escalated," and mostly sitting in an automated queue while my business bleeds. No real answer. No timeline. Nothing.
I trusted Google Cloud to hold my customers' data and run my company. Two days of downtime over a charge I didn't make, and all I can do is wait and hope someone over there decides to flip it back on. If you're building anything real, think hard before you put all of it somewhere that can be switched off like this. I'm moving everything I can to AWS.
If anyone at Google sees this, I've got my project ID and case numbers ready. If anyone have any contact that could help, I would appreciate
damn, feel that pain ...
I spent 2 month talking to google support to fix the "loop" bug in the workflow that blocked my account, I could not to update the data I needed to proceed with "something" and I could not delete the profile because "something was in progress", and the loop started over, one of google service says "you need to go there and fill contact form" -> that contact form reviewed and said: you need to go there (step 1) its not our property, and over and over again ... Even some manager called to from India phone number "Customer support" even him could not realise what is going on with my account ...
ps. Still didn't fix the issue, but got email a few days ago that they finally realised what was the problem and "will" try to resolve it..
> If you're building anything real, think hard before you put all of it somewhere that can be switched off like this. I'm moving everything I can to AWS.
What makes you think AWS can’t be switched off in exactly the same way?
Google killed my startup in a similar way many years ago. In my case, they turned quota on services I needed down to 0, refused to tell me why, and closed my appeal. I never figured out what went wrong.
I'll never again use a cloud service where I'm not big enough to get quality customer service, which rules out the big clouds. It's too much of a business risk.
This guys. This. I worked at a company where this happened for 8h (different cloud). Luckily DNS managed outside so we could switch and get services up again. But it wasn't a simple tf apply I'll tell ya.
This is the "lost 9" of availability people don't think about.
This can happen to anyone. It is 3rd party risk. Cloud, VPS, colo etc. DNS and backups and recovery runbooks and customer contact details is your last resort.
Sorry to hear that! Maybe try posting on LinkedIn? This may get traction there
Did you have backups for all your data with a different company?
Even if not, there's definitely a way to recover.
AWS may be better than Google on automated authoritarionism. But that's a low bar to beat. Your fate not in your own hands.
>> I trusted Google Cloud to hold my customers' data and run my company.
Why? Seriously, how did Google earn your trust enough to the degree that you decided to make them the single point of failure for your million $ business?
I feel like you can consider this an education - an expensive one at that.
I've got bad news for your re the cloud
Yeah it's very dangerous to rely on Google as a small to medium business. Support is deliberately non existent.
good luck my friend
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How can you tell AI was used here? I'm curious.
I must admit that I felt like it was AI generated too. AI has an habit of saying in threes,
1M ARR, 100k users, a product people actually pay for and depend on.
this line feels something that LLM'ism sometimes do too: Someone got hold of one of my API keys and ran up charges on Google's AI services that I never touched. $4,200 hit my card for usage that wasn't mine. Fine, happens I paid the bill. But Google suspended my whole project. Everything lived in there. The backend, and every single customer photo, over a million of them.
A and B, C but D,E,F
again the rules of threes.
Although I am not sure what zach saw but I just got the internal vibe that it was written, atleast partially with the help of AI so I could atleast attest to that.
I can be totally wrong and I usually am and that's okay but just wanted to share that zach might not be wrong about it being generated with LLM's.
and Yes I know that grammar sentences can be formed that way too and this is the sad part about LLM's is that since they copied on our texts themselves, we are unable to find the difference if a text is LLM generated or not and I don't have any absolutely definitive proof of it being this way but yeah, I hope I am able to get my point across.
The sibling has pointed out some things and you can check that, but —
This has AI fingerprints all over it and it was clear to me too. The fact that not only do people not notice this, but also that the comment pointing it out is dead and I can’t even reply to it, is sad/scary/funny. The internet of people is literally dying before our eyes and HN just flags anyone helping to sound the alarm.