Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2024 March 26

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March 26

How to "get rid of" Google Cloud?

A month ago or so, I advised my father to buy storage space at Google so that all photos on his Android phone are automatically backed up to the cloud. Google offers 100 GB of space for a very small monthly fee, and I use this myself and am very happy with it.

I think the service is called Google Drive, or maybe Google One. I find it hard to understand what things are actually called.

We did manage to set up a 100 GB subscription, and it works great!

But unfortunately, before we succeeded in setting this up, I think we accidentally started a free trial of something known as Google Cloud, which apparently is not the same thing as Google Drive/One/the consumer-friendly 100 GB photo cloud storage thing.

Today, he received an email from Google telling him that his Google Cloud trial was about to end:

Your free trial has ended.
Take action now to keep what you built.
Time has run out, and your free trial is over. After 30 days, your work may be deleted. Activate your full account now to keep what you built and gain full access to Google Cloud.

Then there was a big button named "Active your full account", and my father clicked this (which he really should not have done).

Apparently he did really activate something, because then he got a new mail:

Thanks for activating your full account.
You now have full access to Google Cloud products, including monthly usage of services in the Free Tier program.
You can set up budget alerts to track charges on your billing account.

Of course, my father has no idea what this is all about. Actually, the same goes for me. I have no idea what this is. All I can tell is that this is not the consumer-friendly photo cloud storage my father wants to use.

So, the question is how to get rid of this. Obviously, he does not want to pay a monthly fee for something he will not use. (Is there a monthly fee for Google Cloud? Even I have no idea.) But he also doesn't want to remove his credit card entirely from Google, since it is used to pay for the cheap monthly 100 GB photo storage thing.

Any advice?

--Andreas Rejbrand (talk) 14:49, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

Now it's not possible because the monthly plan is activated but for sure you can cancel the next month plan but for this you have to make the request to google cloud supporting team.. 14.139.242.13 (talk) 16:53, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

Try this: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/close-or-reopen-billing-account manya (talk) 07:32, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

Google Cloud is Google's enterprise cloud computing solution, intended for IT and software developers among others. You can check Google Cloud's billing page if you are being billed for anything, and it will give you a breakdown of what you are being billed for and where it's coming from. If you are not being billed for anything, which sounds like it should be the case, then you can safely ignore this as it will never charge you without your explicit consent first.

If for whatever reason you are getting charged for something, then something else might have gone horribly wrong (account compromised, your father clicked something by accident, etc.), you should be able to cancel any services and delete resources that are being used and you are paying for. I don't know how you would go about trying to get your money back in an instance like that. You would also want to secure your account in such an event.

Further steps you can take are closing your billing account on Google Cloud. This will remove any possibility of them charging you in the future, as they will effectively not have anything to send the bill to. You can follow the "Self-serve account" steps on Google Cloud's billing help page here. Identithree (talk) 23:54, 9 April 2024 (UTC)