I operate multiple apps which were providing my entire livelihood, and I wake up one day to realize it's all gone.<p>Long story short, Google froze my Google Pay account which is used to pay for anything related to Google services, including GCP. This was done as they need to temporarily suspend me to 'verify' me. The GCP team couldn't help me since it was an issue with Google Pay. Not to mention their chat support is useless and doesn't have any power to look into cases.<p>Now I login to find out my Google Pay account is 'temporarily suspended' since I need to verify my account. I go ahead and add my drivers license and fill out their form, but while they verify details they suspend your ability to pay for any Google services.<p>So now I can't pay for GCP usage (firebase) and all my authentication, database, cloud functions, are all not usable since the service is suspended. Unlike Amazon who offers phone lines for resolving billing issues, Google does no such thing. I wish I chose AWS.<p>The end result is that I have apps I spent years of my life building and which currently feed me to only be rendered unusable because some AI at google thought my Google Pay needed additional verification.<p>My whole life has done a 180 in the past week. I feel like I'm a man with literally nothing to lose and I can't live with myself anymore. This hurts much more than losing a job for me.<p>Please stay far, far away from Google services of any kind. They are by far the worst of the big tech companies when it comes to developer support.
Google locked our company out of using our own domain on Google Workspaces because a former employee had signed up for a Workspace account using our domain, and we had no way to recover it. We literally manage our domain in GCP but they wouldn't accept that <i>we own our own domain</i> and thus won't let us use our domain with Workspaces, which screws you out of a lot of Google functionality. Never seen a company that was too incompetent to allow users to use its own product and make zero attempt to solve the customer's problem.<p>Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said "We need scale to be profitable." No, you need to stop treating your customers like crap to be profitable. We don't trust you, you are a pain in our asses, and we have alternatives, so there is really no need for us to spend our money on you. It's now a matter of <i>when</i> we all move to AWS and Azure, not <i>if</i>.
Wow I'm really sorry this happened to you. I do believe your conclusions are correct about AWS. Azure generally seems fine too.<p>Google's aversion to customer service makes them extremely dangerous as a cloud provider in my mind. This also goes for other critical business services, like Gsuite (I know! It's convenient).<p>If you have GCP or Gsuite now and you're trying to evaluate how big of a deal it is my suggestion would be to pick up a phone and attempt to talk with someone at Google about your account. This experience can act as a preview of what that process might look like when services are turned off.<p>If you try to call Amazon on the other hand it feels like Jeff Bezos might hop on the call if things aren't going well.
In the beginning of the year, I was recommended by a friend working at Google to test GCP using the tutorials on <a href="https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cloudskillsboost.google/</a><p>Google banned my account while I was doing one tutorial. One step failed, the provisioning of something, and I had to redo a few things again. It succeeded but I had used more egress bandwidth than allowed to run the tutorial correctly so they banned me automatically a few minutes later.<p>The support unbanned me after some time but I thought it was a sign to not use GCP yet.
This is really sad. I feel bad for you and hope you manage to rebuild
your base somewhere else safe - hopefully with technology that you
control.<p>You won't be the last person to get screwed over by the callous
machinery of dehumanised big-tech (AWS or Microsoft would be no
better, sadly I think you are rationalising loss). We must all wake up
to just how horribly precarious the lives of ordinary people are
against the arbitrary whim of opaque, unassailable power centres that
masquerade as "Free services".
My first experience with AWS was around 2013 when I accidentally left a (cheap) ec2 instance running for months after I was done experimenting with it. Support refunded me no questions asked. Fast forward 2 years and that experience was an important factor in my decision to run servers costing 6 figures annually with AWS over their competition.
> I wish I chose AWS.<p>Well... AWS has better support IMO (like actual people you can talk to).<p>But I still chose to not tie myself to any of these platforms for anything critical. It requires additional upfront effort, but I can migrate all my applications off of AWS in a moment.<p>There is no easy way around Google and Apple when it comes to your app staying available, but I am trying to minimise any chances I could be flagged for anything (basically not linking those accounts to any other services).
Sadly we hear so much of this on a daily basis as we are often sought out to support suspended Google Business Profile (GBP) accounts.<p>It's not uncommon to have these same small to medium sized business owners ask for help with other suspended accounts in other Google apps like GoogleAds or Google Merchant Center.<p>The support across all platforms is a growing eyesore for Google, and at this point I hope becomes the catalyst for real change in this space.<p>It was bad enough when Yelp would act like the Mafia in regards to how they approached and treated businesses, but this level of negligence (from such a tech giant) is something to really see.<p>We've been advocating on behalf of all these small businesses for years and truely hope that the outcry grows to a fever pitch where no more band aid solutions are used anymore.
Same thing happened to me: “suspended, need extra verification” after YEARS of the account existing just fine. Nothing helped. Not doing what they asked (multiple photos of photo id), not emailing, nor calling support.<p>I ended up calling an ex-coworker who still worked at google. He sent an internal email. It was resolved the same day. I never found out what the issue was.<p>Don’t use google for anything you care about, unless you maintain close friendships with googlers.
It's sad none (I think?) of the big cloud providers doesn't allow for prepaid account, it would solve both "our idiots thought that blocking long-term paying customers with no human intervention is a good idea" and "I woke up this morning with $20k AWS bill" problems
Yeah, that sounds about par for the course for Google.<p>I don’t understand why anyone would ever choose them for anything critical.<p>Free support for AWS is better than <i>anything</i> Google has (at least based on my reading, for obvious reasons I have no first-hand experience).
Google - “What kind of cloud would a clown make?”<p>I just can’t fathom Google’s inability to sort this out. They’ve been the laughing stock of serious cloud business for years.
Sigh. It's now been [0] days since the last "My [business | e-mail | critical thing] depended entirely on a single service with no backup, I got suspended, and now I can't do my [business | e-mail | critical thing]!" story. I do sympathize, and the right fix is for these services to have better support, but come on... These stories happen so often and get ample press. They should not be surprising. Please stop doing this, people! If something you rely on for your livelihood depends on a single company as a single point of failure, that is a flaming, burning emergency that needs to be solved right now!
I’m sorry. Are you able to work with your customers to keep their business while you sort this?<p>I would port your stuff to aws. Most services have close equivalents and it is probably worth while to try. As another poster noted it might be useful to have cross provider redundancy.<p>I’ll be honest I have refused to work at gcp and have steered the mega corps I’ve advised on cloud choices explicitly away from gcp. Azure is better, but less technically sophisticated. It’s still a one shop cloud. And any company whose core business is surveillance and advertising won’t care about their customers - you’re just meat for their machine. Amazon was built around a customer centric business (retail) and aws inherited the ethos of that retail business. It’s technology is marginally less sophisticated than googles, but googles technology comes with an embarrassingly large amount of smugness and clever solutions that fail in clever ways. Amazon basically just wraps up common technologies in a managed control plane (aside from a few primitives like kinesis, SQS, sns, and DynamoDB) and doesn’t infect everything with their smartness.<p>Good luck.
Unsurprising. I keep seeing this story over and over. I use google for nothing and have for years.<p>For me, the key factor is that there's nobody to call. Want support? You had better be famous on twitter.
I have had GSuite with my domain for 10 years, so theres a lot of emails and apps that I used with Google auth. I always worry about what might happen if something out of my control on Google's end locked me out.
Even if its hard, your business should have a strategy for coming back up when a critical vendor cancels your account.<p>Not being able to survive a cloud vendor cancelling you is the 21st century equivalent of not having any backups.
I hear about this kind of thing, all the time. I guess they manage to not do it that often, so I guess I hear only the bad reports, but they are universally awful, when I do hear them, and they all have the same theme:<p>A.I. Broke it, and the [rare] humans in the loop are powerless to mitigate the A.I.'s breakage.<p>I was considering using Firebase, when I started the project that I'm working on, now, but got cold feet, and wrote my own server. It took a while, but I'm glad that I did.
Does this support depend on a region?<p>I’m here in UK, my bill is sub £10k/mo and literally today few hours ago I had an hour with Google engineer discussing use of their MultiClusterIngress to mix GKE standard and Autopilot to handle spikes extremely fast. Afterwards dude sent me docs and his project he used as an example. It’s the second time this month: we don’t even chat about any specific bugs, more about my architecture goals.<p>I also have an account manager and she’s currently working on making discount rates from our contract to work with our new hierarchy of multiple billing accounts, some VAT paying and some not, that my finance department requested.<p>You also can have backup payment methods? I think we have DDs as a default and then CCs as backups.
I had this once with Google Drive, when I forgot to enter my new credit card because the existing one had expired. Took weeks to get my files back. It's like people at Google just wait for shit to happen instead of trying to think of the obvious things that could go wrong beforehand.<p>That being said, if Google is looking for people to lay off there's some obvious candidates. I would include their mangaers too.
There are horror stories like this with all of Big Tech, but Google is hands down the worst offender. I do my best to avoid Google in every corner of my life: the only services I still use are Gmail (slowly migrating to my own domain with another provider though) and Search. But I’ll never use a new Google product anymore because of their unreliability on the long term.
Based upon some of the submitter's previous submissions. It appears that they have some 18+ "dating" apps...<p>Disclaimer: Googler, not in this area.
I was tempted to use Firebase for a new project because it looked so easy. I’m fairly fluent in Angular and it integrates extremely smoothly, so at a surface level it would be the perfect choice for the backend.<p>Stories like yours – thank you for sharing – plus horror reports about sudden 20k bills have prevented me from taking the “cloud” leap. I’m very glad I didn’t, especially because I also learned lots by setting up a web server and the application layer myself.
I too am currently in Google Pay support hell. Never in my life have I experienced such a Byzantine hell of weaponized incompetence.<p>I’d post the thread but it’s just 48 exchanges of me calmly and patiently explaining the situation. And them failing to read the case notes, saying platitudes and then pasting the same non-useful canned response.<p>Here’s a fun fact or two:
Did you know there’s no way to get your money out from the web interface? Did you know there’s no way to select your profile id on iOS? These two features haven’t been implemented. If you’re clever you can reconstruct the rest. Their documentation indicates that they also don’t have an account closure reconciliation process. I’m hoping that’s just inaccurate documentation because that’d be illegal.<p>Good times. Some states attorney generals should band together and sue those jerks.
Google and GCP isn't capable or want to provide support to customers who pay less than ~$20k a month.<p>Don't ever use GCP if you're not a big enough enterprise. Just as you should never buy a Dell laptop as an individual consumer.<p>I'm sorry this happened to you, I hope someone will learn from your experience
<i>> I feel like I'm a man with literally nothing to lose and I can't live with myself anymore.</i><p>Dude, I know the pain, but it's only money. Life goes on. If anything, now it should be your mission to stick it to the faceless corporation, not to give in to dark thoughts.
It’s not AI. It’s a jealous contract worker in India or a jealous Google employee because you were making money with your app.<p>We really need to stop blaming a “Google AI”. Google has 118,000 employees. Someone at Google could help you if they wanted to, but they don’t want to.
That sucks.<p>I don't like Amazon as a company, but AWS support is great. A couple of times in the past I've made some complaint about them on Twitter, and a rep has actually reached out and helped resolve the issue. And I'm a tiny fish, with monthly bills under $10.
No one from Google ever turns up here and says they care and it matters.<p>It's now broadly known that developers and businesses don't trust Google, but strangely as far as I can tell, the google CEO has never been held to account for this.
Thank you for reminding me why I avoid Google services like the plague. Even relying on unmanaged apps on a single pet server is less risky than relying on Google.<p>It's like playing russian roulette with your infra. Google Roulette.
I just want to note that I was able to solve this issue. Thank you to the googler who reached out to me to help, 'rygar', and the rest of the google cloud/pay support team for helping fix this issue.
Same happened to me too. They suspended the payment account. Two accounts actually, because different cards. Sent the driver license picture a dozen times, for one account someone eventually took a look and unlocked it (which took about a week). But another one is in review for several months already. And it's impossible to do anything with that.
I see many blame OP for relying on one single cloud provider without having backup and exit strategy. What if she/he is a single persone doing everything and having just barely the time to run the business?
It's the same mentality I have seen from people complaining about Phoronix quality, ignoring It's a one man show website.
I think this is to be expected(sooner or later) for small businesses dealing with "big tech".<p>You are just a small number in an ocean of "users" so suspending you is really no different than suspending your twitter account. Start taking some responsability folks! Let's stop feeding these walled gardens!
I'm so sorry this happened to you this is why is important to not have a single point of failure. Have domain name in X company, hosting in another, etc.<p>That way if one turns crazy there's More hope
It seems like a large overhead, but making your app multi-cloud compatible to counter for scenarios such as this might be not be as crazy as it sounds.
99.99% availability doesn't cover for scenarios like this.
What are the alternatives? Is Bare Metal with OpenStack or K8s any more resilient to administrative DoS? Do we simply not care about this problem because the businesses being suspended are small fish?
Upvoting in the hopes that someone on HN has a connection internally at Google, AND to raise awareness for this issue.<p>My business uses Firebase, and I'm having serious second thoughts about that right now.
I am very sad to hear that this happened to you. It must’ve been absolutely maddening to be unable to talk to a human being as your business was destroyed.
another satisfied customer!<p>geez guys keep your business away from google, it's tough not being able to reach a damn human for support especially when you're a paying one.
Conversation in this user's comment history. Sounds like he knew the risk he was taking and knew what he'd need to do if it came to that.<p>-----<p>alirsgp on Oct 24, 2021 | parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: 5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0<p>I've published ~20 iOS apps. Only 4 make money, but they allowed me to reach financial independence and never have to work for someone gain at the age of 24.<p>krater23 on Oct 25, 2021 | parent | prev | next [–]<p>What's when your apps are removed from Apple for any reason? Do you have enough money to live without this income? Or do you need then just start over again?<p>alirsgp on Oct 26, 2021 | root | parent | prev | next [–]<p>I'd have ~2 years and not hurting my lifestyle. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but I can get a job if needed