URGENT: First-time paid user charged $250 overnight by automated CLI loop, then locked out of all support as "Free Trial"

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Hello,

I am writing this post as a last resort after a deeply frustrating experience. I was a happy free-tier user of the Gemini CLI. Yesterday, for the first time, I attached a billing account to explore a personal open-source project. This decision has led to an unacceptable situation.

Here is what happened:

  1. The Incident: I was working on a toy project with an open-source project, I asked the Gemini CLI to solve it. I then left it running, trusting it to find a solution. Instead, the CLI tool spent the hours automatically and repeatedly trying to fix the issue in a loop, failing every time. It never solved the problem, but it racked up KRW 327,047 (over $250) in API charges overnight without my knowledge. The first I knew of this was a sudden KRW 200,000 threshold payment charged to my card.

  2. The Support Loop: I immediately tried to contact billing support to request a refund for this unintentional charge. This is where the real nightmare began. I am completely locked out of all support channels because the system incorrectly identifies my account as a “Free Trial,” even though I have been charged as a paid user.

  3. System Failure: Every single path — direct support links, help pages, and even the AI chatbot — ends with the same error: “Your Cloud Billing account is currently a free trial. Live billing chat and email support are not available.” The AI chatbot even offered to connect me to a human agent, but when I requested it, it just repeated the same “Free Trial” error, trapping me in an inescapable loop.

This is a fundamental system failure. I have been charged a significant amount of money due to an uncontrolled automated CLI tool’s process, and now I am being denied the very support I need to address it.

I wanted to increase my productivity by becoming a paid customer. Instead, I have wasted hours navigating a broken support system.

Please, can a Google employee or a community manager see this and manually escalate my case to the billing support team? I am completely stuck and simply want to resolve this mistake. and please improve Gemini debugging skill with Typescript, and detect some meaningless endless loop by himself, or let me have safty limit or guad on excessive billing.

Thank you.