Need help to identify Cloud Spanner charges on our billing account

Google Cloud Database
1

Dear Community,

Can you help us trying to find out why our account has Cloud Spanner charges, but we don’t have any Spanner service in use. Today a new charge appeared for around US$20 in our account, and it appears on billing but If we search on the Spanner tab for services, we don’t have any active, and also we never have used Spanner before.

Have you any of you experienced this issue before?

Best,

Carlos.

2 Likes
4

Hey @Carlos_AcelerAi,

Do you use Vertex AI RAG Engine? If so, it could be where those mystery charges are coming from.

  • Vertex AI RAG Engine uses a Cloud Spanner database under the hood to manage its data. This is called RagManagedDb.
  • This Spanner instance lives in a Google-managed project, not directly in yours. That’s why you don’t see it listed in your Spanner console.
  • Even though it’s “hidden” from your view, the costs for running that Spanner instance (compute, storage, etc.) are passed through to your billing account.
  • The default “Basic” tier for RagManagedDb provisions a small Spanner instance (100 processing units), which would result in daily charges.
3 Likes
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I am facing the same problem, and I dont know if used RAG Engine of Vertex AI, but I used Vertex AI, so now my question is how can remove it from billing, it charged me for 40$.

1 Like
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Hello, have you created a billing support case?

One of our customer has 550$ cumulative charge appeared from september 4 to today. So, I’d love to hear your update. Recently there were two more charges comes from gemini models. (1. nano banana release incident, 2. gemini 2.5 pro charge appears without usage)

I’m doubting about the model releases causing a bug in the billing system, or maybe somebody did vibe billing, who knows? :man_shrugging:t2:

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Hey Andrew, but after 90 days (free tier passed), it doesn’t shows up any charges. Somehow at sep 4 shows up the usage.

Especially, not free tier but enterprise tier pricing shows up.

9

I believe the default is actually the Scaled tier.

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Hello guys, just in case, I’ve made a guide on how to troubleshoot and stop these weird/unexpected Cloud Spanner costs.