Google Cloud Billing Reimbursement via Donations?

[Paul Oranje]

Op 2 aug. 2023, om 22:52 heeft Paul Spooren <mail at aparcar.org> het volgende geschreven:
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.  
> 
> 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?
> 
> Sunshine,
> Paul
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Hi Paul,

That's an undeserved experience. You should not bear those costs personally and (to me) it seems completely natural and justified to use the donations for those expenses.
Please keep us informed so that in case you cannot be refunded from the donations nor the SFC (or other organisation) we can try to crowdfund it.
Besides, any decision on the use of the donations and the arguments therefor are of interest to the community anyhow.

Regards,
Paul