College projects and assignments often put a dent in students’ wallets. For one Indian student, however, it shockingly generated a bill of almost Rs 1 lakh – an amount that was too exorbitant for the student. The case involves the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), something which the student’s college allegedly forced its students to use for project completion.
The student, identified online as u/ConceptPretty7717 (real name Girish Naik), took to the r/DevelopersIndia subreddit to share his ordeal. As reported by India Today, he stated that his college had mandated students to create GCP accounts and attach a billing method for their lab work. Naik insists that he used the platform only for the specific assignments given by his institution.
College student gets billed Rs 1 lakh by Google
Despite limiting his usage, Naik suddenly began receiving emails demanding payment of Rs 98,940 for using the cloud services. The situation escalated rapidly, with Naik reporting that a US-based collections agency (ABC Amega) has now begun sending him ‘past-due balance’ notices, thus confirming the seriousness of the charges. He also noted that payment notifications from Google indicated his linked payment method had failed.
Crucially, Naik claims that his college has been unresponsive on that front, leaving him to deal with the debt alone. This lack of support has forced him to seek advice from the online developer community on Reddit, regarding his liability and how to dispute the charges. Google and the college are yet to make any public comments regarding the issue.
Developer community tries to help
The developer community response has been mixed. Many users speculated that the high bill likely comes from a common rookie mistake where a service, such as a large virtual machine, was forgotten and left running continuously – a scenario many developers encounter with cloud platforms like GCP and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
However, the top advice from Redditors has been to immediately contact Google Cloud support and request a billing waiver. Given that the circumstances of the usage was for an educational project, many members said that cloud providers often grant waivers for such unexpected student charges.
