I am being charged for free resources. How can I get a refund and prevent this thing from happening?

[Jakub_St]

As it stays in the title, I am being charged for using a free VM instance (e2-micro in US west + 10GB standard persistent disk). It's covered under the "Free Tier products": https://cloud.google.com/free 

The billing raport looks like this: 

Google Cloud tried to charge me, but my debit card was empty. I am afraid GC will try to charge me again, so I want to ask you how can I prevent this? If you have some questions about my resource usage in Google Cloud (to help me get a resolution to my problem), I will provide the answer

[lawrencenelson]

Hi @Jakub_St,

Welcome to the Google Cloud Community!

To start, based on the official documentation, please check that you have not performed any of the following actions [1]:

• You can't add GPUs to your VM instances.
• You can't request a quota increase. For an overview of Compute Engine quotas, see Resource quotas.
• You can't create VM instances that are based on Windows Server images.
• You can't create Google Cloud VMware Engine resources.
• 1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM instance per month in one of the following US regions (should not apply to you):
  • Oregon: us-west1
  • Iowa: us-central1
  • South Carolina: us-east1
• 30 GB-months standard persistent disk
• 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month

Additionally, the Compute Engine free tier does not charge for an external IP address [2], but to be sure, please check that you have not attached an external IP address to your VM.

I hope this helps. 

Best,
Law

[1]. https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features
[2]. https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#free-tier-usage-limits