Google Cloud Platform - Keep My Websites Free 🔗

I use Google Cloud Platform to host my websites. This is how I make sure the platform stays free and investigate the costs that appear.

1. Set a budget email alert 🔗

Billing => Budget & Alerts => Create Budget => Set Amount to 0 => Finish.

2. See which project has costs 🔗

Billing => Reports => See which project has costs.

3. See the description of the cost 🔗

Billing => Transactions => See description of the cost.

In my case it was “Cloud Storage Standard Storage Europe Multi-region: 0.217 Gibibyte-months [Currency conversion: USD to CHF using rate 0.961]” with the artifacts from building the code before each release.

4. Automatically delete build artifacts 🔗

Storage => Browser => *.artifacts.* => Lifecycle Rules => Add Rule => Age => 1 => Action => Delete => Save.

5. Delete past build artifacts 🔗

Storage => Browser => *.artifacts.* => Select all folders => Delete.