Can I stop google billing me if I reach my free api limit

I asked about this in the Cloud support, and they told me this:

You can use Programmatic Budget Notifications in order to perform custom actions when reaching spend thresholds. For instance, you can disable billing on your project when reaching the free tier limit.

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify

Note this will disable the billing completely and can even cause your Cloud projects to be deleted!

See the warning:

This example removes billing from your project, shutting down all resources. Resources might not shut down gracefully, and might be irretrievably deleted. There is no graceful recovery if you disable billing. You can re-enable billing, but there is no guarantee of service recovery and manual configuration is required.


Some things may be outside your control. Google support has confirmed to me that their own bot hits count towards billable maps API usage. So they decide the level of spidering, and then charge for it.

I believe this is called the "Fish in a Barrel" business model


There is no way to do that.

The only 2 things available now is to:

  1. Based on your monthly usage, calculate approximately your daily usage (per API) and set daily limits. You can do so by going to the API Console, select an API, navigate to the Quotas tab, and edit the daily or per-second quotas. You can use this Calculator.

  2. Set billing budgets and alarms. To control your spend, you can set billing budgets and alarms so that you are notified when your usage reaches a given budget. Here’s how.

Be noticed that these alarms are only "an alarm based on a budget", they won't stop the usage from your project.