Side project went viral, now Google is charging me $1k. Help?

Question

About two years ago I hacked together a side project (https://bennettfeely.com/antiweather) that compares the weather at your location and the exact opposite point on Earth.It uses the (affordable) Dark Sky API to get the weather forecast at two antipodes and Google's Reverse Geocoding API to simply get the geographic name of a coordinate.The project was live then but never received much traffic until it was posted on /r/InternetIsBeautiful yesterday.Now I see I am being charged a little over $1,000 from Google for using their API.I wish I kept a closer eye on the fact Google jacked up the price of their APIs since I released Antiweather two years ago.Maybe someone can help me understand why it costs 50x more to simply get the name of a location (Google) than it does to get detailed weather conditions and forecast for any point on Earth (Dark Sky).I don't feel much hope of finding a way around this surprise bill but I am posting here for any advice at all. Is there any chance at forgiveness for a recent college grad whose side project unintentionally went viral, anyone to contact?

Quequau · Accepted Answer

Have you considered asking the moderators of /r/InternetIsBeautiful if you could make a post explaining what happened and asking for some crowd funding?

mgliwka · Answer

A free OpenStreetMap based alternative you could use to keep it running in the future:http://photon.komoot.de/http://photon.komoot.de/reverse?lon=10&lat=52

jnfr · Answer

First of all, congratulations! That's really exciting!This is a costly mistake to learn, but to offer a bit of hope, at my last start-up we accidentally racked up high costs on the location API. Our CEO hopped on the phone with them a few times and was able to get the bill down. Good luck!

dyeje · Answer

First, find a cheaper API that accomplishes the same goal. Second, email Google billing and see if they're willing to give a discount considering the accidental and non-commercial nature of the charge.

crispyporkbites · Answer

Call Google and I'm sure they'll sort it out
Oh wait, that's not the way Google does support. What you should do is get someone with lots of twitter followers to tweet @google until someone notices this and solves it for you.
Not everyone has enough followers to activate this channel, but surely you know someone who works at Google or has 100k followers?

verdverm · Answer

If this is a first time, Google will make one time refunds if you reach out to billing

paulbishop · Answer

hmm me thinks ya business model should have absorbed this and turned it into revenue?

villgax · Answer

Nope, you should have anticipated & used better alternatives. Just apply the same in the real world & you'll see how your approach changes.