One hundred thousand dollars. Three months. Not a single customer.
Sounds like a myth for MBA lectures? But no, it’s a common story. Three founders, coffee from a vending machine in a coworking space, and the belief that “Google Cloud is a cheap start, you only pay for what you actually use.” If Google Cloud Consulting Services had been around back then, someone would have immediately said, “Guys, set limits, turn off what you don’t need, the bill won’t wait.” But no one said it.
A quarter later, investors looked up from their screens and asked the most unpleasant question: “Where’s the traction?”
There was a pause in the room. Not the kind you see in movies — the awkward kind, when someone’s throat tightens and the expense table keeps sliding further and further down. One investor pushed the laptop away. Another rubbed his eyes. Someone muttered ‘this can’t be right’. Nobody laughed. Just an empty Google Sheet, numbers crawling row by row. One line was a $2,800 ‘test environment’ nobody remembered spinning up.
The bitter truth? Google Cloud didn’t fail us. It did exactly what it said on the tin — counted every compute minute, every gig of storage, every scrap of egress traffic. No illusions, no tricks. The failure was ours. Or, to be precise — everyone’s and no one’s. Each of us was “busy with product,” too busy to look at the dashboard. Alerts were red for weeks — we just clicked them away. Later, one guy admitted: “I honestly thought someone else was shutting down the test servers.” Of course, nobody did.
It was like accounting without an accountant. Everything ran smoothly… until the bill showed up and turned out bigger than two engineers’ monthly salaries. And startups keep thinking they can afford it.
Where Exactly Is The Cloud Burning Money?
If we analyze this case in detail, it becomes clear that the money did not go into the product. It just leaked out, line by line, and nobody noticed until it was too late.
| The cloud promises | Where the money is leaking | What the CTO Really Sees |
| “Pay for what you use” | Test environments that no one turned off | An expense chart with no explanation, and the question in your head: “What are we even running every night?” |
| “Flexible data storage” | Duplication of files, lack of lifecycle management | A storage bill that suddenly exceeds a month’s payroll. “Do we store data or does it store us?“ |
| “Global Network” | Egress traffic (unloading data to the outside) | Bills for terabytes that no one planned for. “We were just testing the upload, why does it cost half a team?” |
| “Integrations in minutes” | SaaS that were “connected for the sake of testing” and forgotten | Monthly subscriptions that the founders only learn about from the accountant. “Guys, who even uses this?” |
When The Cloud Works Too Well
The biggest pitfall of the cloud is not the price, but convenience. Press a button, and the service is up and running. Wonderful. Except that the meter is also running. Like a taxi left in the yard with the meter running: the car is standing still, but the money is ticking away.
This is where the illusion begins: “Consulting? That’s for corporations. We’re small, we can handle it ourselves.” Mistake number one. Large companies have the right to make mistakes — they burn through a million and move on. But for a startup, even a $20K overspend is enough to put payroll on the line.
We saw how N-iX (an official Google Cloud Partner) joined the team and asked uncomfortable questions about budgets. Not about the product, but about consumables: why limits weren’t set, who last checked the data, why keep extra environments. And it got awkward. Because no one had thought about it seriously. It’s not Google Cloud that kills you. It’s overconfidence: “we’ll think about it later.”
What Consulting Would Have Changed
Imagine that consultants had intervened in their story before launch. Not heroic “firefighters,” but ordinary Google Cloud partners who would have asked three simple questions:
- How many services do you really need?
- Who will turn off what is not being used?
- Where will you set the limits?
The answers wouldn’t have been pretty, but they could’ve saved the runway:
— Instead of 20 “toy” services, there would be 5 working ones.
— Instead of tens of thousands in storage bills, there would be an automatic lifecycle.
— Instead of panic among investors, there would be a clear TCO (total cost of ownership).
Using N-iX as an example, Google Cloud Consultants Services does not sell the illusion of “universal tools.” They get involved in the process as architects, setting control points at the MVP stage. And that’s exactly what startups don’t usually do.
Conclusion
Do you know how it turned out? A year later, one of those guys was joking at the bar: “We didn’t build a product. We built the most expensive calculator for Google Cloud. And the only thing it calculated well was how fast we could lose our runway.”
Everyone laughed. Kind of. Then it went quiet because every single person at the table had their own forgotten test instance, their own stupid bill.
That’s the real punchline: you either tell this story yourself, or someone else tells it about you.