CostHexCloud bill incidents
Real bills that ran away, reconstructed from the people who got them. Each one covers what happened, why it cost so much, how it ended, and what to change so it doesn’t happen to you.
| When | Platform | What happened | Bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2024 | Netlify | DDoS on one 3.44 MB mp3, about 190 TB in four days | $104,500 |
| June 2024 | Vercel | Viral growth hit an API on Vercel Functions, no spend limit | $96,280 |
| February 2026 | Google Cloud | Stolen Gemini API key used for Gemini 3 Pro image and text calls | $82,314 |
| March 27, 2020 | Firebase / Google Cloud | Self-calling Cloud Run scraper made 116 billion Firestore reads | $72,000 |
| April 2024 | AWS | Unauthorized PUTs to a private S3 bucket | $1,300 |