A developer woke up to an $82,000 GCP bill. Why Google’s UI fails, and our free fix.

About six months ago, a developer woke up to an $82,000 Google Cloud bill in 48 hours after hackers scraped an exposed API key—a story that surfaced on Reddit and was highlighted by cloud expert Walter Lee:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7434904405922955264/

A year into this exploit wave, Google still offers no clear out-of-the-box safeguards:

1. Budget alerts only send emails after money is already burned.

2. Hard limits (quotas) exist, but GCP buries them so deep in the UI labyrinth that developers forget they even exist.

3. Teams routinely forget to disable unused APIs, leaving unmonitored services wide open to abuse.

Then we became hostages to this exact trap ourselves: in just 45 minutes, an unexpected spike slapped us with a €220 bill (screenshot attached).

That was the breaking point. We got seriously furious and refused to accept the status quo.

Tomorrow, we are officially launching Free Maps Calculator on Product Hunt.

It’s a completely free, 100% client-side Chrome extension (zero telemetry) that guides you through setting safe $0 billing quotas (10,000 requests/month) directly in your GCP console—and persistently reminds you to shut down any unused APIs that pose a financial threat.

How do you manage quotas and unused APIs across your cloud projects? Hit "Notify me" above to catch tomorrow's launch, or share your setup below!