It sucks that they gave you conflicting information that resulted in this but I wouldn't trust having my cloud infrastructure payments be handled using a single credit card.
If you have a spend of over $2500/mo you can apply for invoiced billing directly from Google or if you have less than that you can contact a GCP reseller partner to get invoiced by them.
Some GCP reseller partners also have a close relationship with Google and the contacts that come with that relationship.
All of the relationships I have with suppliers are handled by an account manager at the supplier who I can call to get things sorted out. This is normal.
Why should a business relationship with Google (or any other cloud service) be any different? I don't use GCP but if I was going to start, I would ensure that I have a person to call or its a non-starter.
> Why should a business relationship with Google (or any other cloud service) be any different?
Depends on the size of the account surely? Maybe there's some support person to talk to, but there's plenty of services I subscribe to fo $10-100/month and I dont have an account manager for any of them.
Yeah but for almost all of this kind of service you have some sort of phone, email or 24/7 helpdesk system.
Google however is infamous for not providing support at all on all their services, even if your complete digital identity got killed off because some AI can't recognize that the "CSAM" you sent was in fact communication with your child's doctor [1].
> Why should a business relationship with Google (or any other cloud service) be any different?
Because google choose to make this as difficult as possible. A couple of years ago I worked on a third party IAAS database cloud product (think Atlas or Elastic Cloud, but for a different database), and while Azure had the worst tech overall, Google were ultimately the hardest to deal with by a VERY long way because they don’t acknowledge the existence of people as anything other than ad targets.
Not much for you but a lot for others. This type of arrogance really doesn't belong in this space. Maybe you spend $25,000? $250,000? peanuts to large companies so its okay that Google cloud drops the ball on you?
This is the only right answer with large cloud providers. Get a human to be involved with your account and do invoice payment as soon as they allow it.
You have a person to reach out to if things go pear shaped, and N(weeks|months) to sort out payments issues instead of having everything get suspended by robots.
1. Because they'd probably have to hire several hundred humans and give them benefits. It's much cheaper just to trust the robots.
2. Unlike a small hosting company, Google is so big it will suffer essentially no financial consequences if their robots make a wrong decision for credit card customers a few times per month.
So there is no cost to Google for leaving the system as is, and a high cost for your solution. The decision is a no-brainer from their point of view.
This is what OP should really have done. All of the big cloud providers allow this. We had the same thing with AWS. As soon as you contact your account manager with things like this shit gets done quick. If you are on Pay as you go with a CC your messages just fall into a black hole.
If you have a spend of over $2500/mo you can apply for invoiced billing directly from Google or if you have less than that you can contact a GCP reseller partner to get invoiced by them.
Some GCP reseller partners also have a close relationship with Google and the contacts that come with that relationship.