I still had to pay it or else I wouldn't have been able to use my account.
Would that have been so bad? The world might be a better place if people stopping pouring money into that cesspit.
By continue to use their services, you're encouraging the anti-consumer tactics you're complaining about.
On that note, I'll just mention that I had discovered over the last while that when you prepay $10 into your Anthropic account, either directly, or via the newer "Extra usage" in subscription plans, and then use Claude Code, they will repeatedly overbill you, putting you into a negative balance. I actually complained and they told me that they allow the "final query" to complete rather than cutting it off mid-process, which is of course silly, because Claude Code is typically used for long sessions, where the benefit of being cut off 52% into the task rather than 51% into it is essentially meaningless.
I ended up paying for these so far, but would hope that someone with more free time sues them on it.
This means that billing happens asynchronously. You may use queues, you may do batching, etc. But you won't have a realtime view of the costs
Well, that makes sense in principle, but they obviously do have some billing check that prevents me from making additional requests after that "final query". And they definitely have some check to prevent me from overutilizing my quota when I have an active monthly subscription. So whatever it is that they need to do, when I prepay $x, I'm not ok with them charging me more than that (or I would have prepaid more). It's up to them to figure this out and/or absorb the costs.
No they don't actually! They try to get close, but it's not guaranteed (for example, make that "final query" to two different regions concurrently).
Now, they could stand up a separate system with a guaranteed fixed cost, but few people want that and the cost would be higher, so it wouldn't make the money back.
You can do it on your end though: run every request sequentially through a service and track your own usage, stopping when reaching your limit.
If you have a cap and then your thing hits the front page and suddenly has 10000% more legitimate traffic than usual, and you want the legitimate traffic, they're going to get an error page instead of what you want. If there is no cap, you're going to get a large bill. People hate both of those things and will complain regardless of which one actually happens.
The main thing Google is screwing up here is not giving you the choice between them.
This is one of the reasons people have suggested using a different provider for backups.
Google will probably have me go through five bots and if, by some kind of miracle, I manage to have a human on the phone, they will probably explain to me that I should have read the third paragraph of the fourth page of the self service doc and it's obviously my fault.
But have you considered it from the companies POV? Charging whatever you like and its always the customers fault is a pretty sweet deal. Up next in the innovation pipeline is charging customers extra fees for something or other. It'll be great!