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This is a question, at the same time hopefully informing others on what to do. If not posted in the correct section, I apologise.

I encountered a very high bill charged to my credit card. I knew it was something to do with Firebase, possibly the sms authentication, as the likely culprit. I contacted support and they verified it was the case and pointed me in the right direction.

The issues faced were:

  1. Google Cloud Billing Alert Thresholds did not activate
  2. Credit card was charged multiple times until blocked by the bank
  3. I was only made aware when Google Cloud emailed:Action required: your billing account xx is past due, (due to credit card overlimit)

Charges were over for much higher (12 millon %) of the normal monthly charge.

First day was almost 1k sms messages sent to Myanmar.
Next day Over 1k to Egypt.
3rd day over 1k sms'es to multiple countries.
4th day over 1k sms'es to Egypt again.

I have since edited my SMS region policy on Firebase Authentication under settings. I will edit the list periodically.

Is there anything else I should do?

Thanks...

Shock

SMS regions

Alert Triggers Failed

Edited SMS region policy

Tried contacting support. Got some decent responses, but still not sure if I will be compensated in any way.

Russ Westwood
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  • *firebaser here* Sorry about the shock. It looks like you took the correct first steps, but also have a look at my answer to the question I linked. Specifically, folks have been seeing good results with the combination of the allow/deny listing of countries as you've done, and implementing App Check. – Frank van Puffelen Aug 07 '23 at 14:04
  • Thank you Frank. Received an email from Firebase yesterday:| On August 1, 2023 we made a change to the SMS pricing for Firebase Auth and Identity Platform, which was announced in billing notifications sent on April 10, 2023 and again on June 12, 2023. We discovered an error in our recipient list and found that not all customers received this billing notification. We are very sorry for the confusion that this has caused. We have rolled back the pricing changes (effective August 9, 2023), and are reversing all Firebase Auth SMS charges incurred from August 1-9, 2023. – Russ Westwood Aug 12 '23 at 08:07
  • @FrankvanPuffelen This is good news, for me as an individual entity. But I still have an open ticket with Google Cloud Support regarding the billing Budget Alerts that did not trigger. If this should happen again from any of the active SMS regions, and Budget Alerts are do not trigger, I might not be aware of the fact that it is happening. – Russ Westwood Aug 12 '23 at 08:09
  • Did the alert really not fire, not even delayed? That'd be concerning indeed. – Frank van Puffelen Aug 12 '23 at 14:19
  • Yeah @FrankvanPuffelen not even a delayed trigger. – Russ Westwood Aug 20 '23 at 07:31

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