A Wellington man racked up an unexpectedly big bill when he used Google BigQuery. Photo / New York Times
Cloud bill-shock in the capital. Meridian axes 53 jobs as it offshored billing. Kiwibank takes the right side in the open banking war - at least from fintech’s point-of-view.
UPDATE: Google refunded Broadley in full, three days after this article was published.
Wellington tech contractor Drew Broadley says he racked up a surprise $15,760 bill during May using Google BigQuery, an online tool that’s part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The tech giant describes BigQuery as “a fully managed, AI-ready data platform for managing and analysing data”.
Broadley says it’s left him worried about how he’ll pay his family’s bills.
The contractor told Tech Insider he considered his query to BigQuery – “a simple query to get time stamps for a client’s Google Analytics activity” – was carefully constrained.
“It was date-limited, column-limited, all the good things you should do when you write a query. I didn’t just go “GIVE IT ALL TO ME”.
He said he runs similar queries all the time, with no issue, racking up only “tens of dollars” in fees.
And Broadley knows his keyboard from his elbow.
He has previously held senior data roles at ACC and Stats NZ, and belongs to Payments NZ’s API Council, which advises on open banking.
He’s currently earning his crust as a fractional chief data officer, offering services around data for businesses – strategically and also operationally – where they can’t justify investing in a full-time role.
His clients include Netsafe, where he’s virtual chief AI and data officer.
Nevertheless, for reasons he’s yet to fathom, BigQuery did try to “give it all” to Broadley, running his query until his business account was exhausted.
Humans and AI can make mistakes.
Broadley said his main beef was “the lack of billing limits and safeguards other than just alerts – which are often 24 hours behind actual activity”.
Asked for comment, a spokeswoman for Google NZ said Google had reached out to Broadley.
The spokeswoman had no immediate comment on the points raised by Broadley, but pointed Tech Insider to a reply left by Google NZ’s AI/ML [machine learning] lead Nakul Gowdra after a post Broadley made on LinkedIn – which quickly attracted 227 reactions and 103 comments – with a number saying they had suffered similar bill-shock experiences.
“I am sorry to hear this and understand the frustration,” Gowdra posted.
“Google Cloud always offers free billing and payment support to all users, without the need to purchase a support plan. If you have already run up a large bill by accident, you are welcome to discuss the bill with Cloud Billing support.
“This is not a promise, nor guarantee that Google Cloud will refund you in any way, however. Cloud Billing can work with you to try to understand why you’ve received the invoice you did.”
Gowdra offered to go through BigQuery “best practices” with Broadley.
He also linked to a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) post on GitHub (a resource for software developers) titled “Unexpectedly Large Invoice”.
It reads, in part, “Users who are new to public cloud’s [sic], such as students or independent developers, will sometimes run up a large amount of costs very quickly without fully understanding why.
“One of the most important things to understand about public clouds, including GCP, is the on-demand pricing model. Unlike a traditional VPS [virtual private server], public clouds are meant to scale to millions, and even billions of users around the world.
“While it’s certainly possible to run a small operation on public clouds, special care must be taken to safeguard your usage, as the default mode of operation is ‘let the user scale for as much as they can allocate’.
“The primary mechanism for keeping watch over your billing in GCP is to set up a budget alert. Budget alerts warn you when you have overrun a budget you define, with the most simple warning mechanism being an email. Budget alerts are not billing caps, and will not stop you from overspending on GCP.”
Broadley said there should be an option for a billing cap. And that Google should have the wherewithal to spot unusual activity and intervene, even if no activity alert was set up.
Meridian says it will “consider the future” of its Flux subsidiary, maker of its in-house billing platform, after inking a deal to use a billing software made by Kraken, a subsidiary of British-based Octopus Energy Group. Fifty-three jobs are being culled with the transition.
Flux will continue to maintain this billing platform while a phased migration to Kraken takes place. This will begin in July and is expected to be completed within 12 months, Meridian said in an NZX filing.
Flux’s other customer, Shell Energy, has a contract through to September 2026.
“Meridian will now consider the future of the subsidiary beyond supporting the transition to Kraken. In the meantime, Flux has implemented a new structure to reflect the focus on customer migration, reducing its workforce from 121 to 68,” Meridian added.
READ MORE: Spark follows Air NZ in deal with Indian outsourcer, Luxon visits offshoring specialist
“The Flux team is first-rate, and its billing platform has done an excellent job for Meridian and Powershop, but the retail landscape is changing, and we now need a much broader technology stack,” said Meridian chief customer officer Lisa Hannifin.
Why go for Kraken over its arch rival, NZX-listed Gentrack - which is up 23% over the past 12 months and has been on a bull run for three years after signing utilities in the UK (where it recently landed a contract with Utility Warehouse covering two million connections) and at home (where the first phase of a major billing system upgrade for Genesis will shortly go live)?
“Kraken stood out as having a track record of delivering world-class technology, with 60 million customer accounts migrated in four years, and a constant pipeline of development and innovation being delivered across their global customer base,” Hannifin told Tech Insider.
“Kraken is built on a modern cloud-native architecture pattern that enables speed and agility for Kraken and its customers, and is a strong fit with Meridian’s retail tech stack and operating model.
“Kraken’s customer-centric culture and technology directly align with our mission to make energy cleaner and cheaper for NZ homes, businesses, and communities.”
Fintechs cheered after the Government leaned on the major banks to support open banking – or introducing APIs (application programming interfaces) from December 1 that will make it a lot easier for financial apps to talk to the banks’ systems.
But they got the pip when they read the fine print of the Government’s announcement, which called on banks to introduce a fee of up to $5 per customer per month for fintechs who took advantage of the new openness – which could add up if the user of a fintech app used multiple banks as they spread their credit card, mortgage and accounts around.
James Wigglesworth, co-founder of budgeting app PocketSmith, penned a post called “Open banking, closed doors”, ranting that news of the fees was a “bombshell ... Contrary to every other country that has implemented CDR [consumer data right], New Zealand is poised to let banks profit from what is a right. It’s like having the right to vote, but then being charged $20 at the voting booth.”
Nick Houldsworth, co-founder of Prosaic, an app for sharing GST income and expenses with your accountant, called the fees a “rip-off”.
Consumer campaigns manager Sahar Lone told Tech Insider: “These fees may seem small, but they create roadblocks for start-ups and new players trying to enter the market. They protect the status quo and weaken the potential for real disruption.”
But the NZ Banking Association has defended the move.
“Our banks support open banking and have made a huge investment in the technology to make it a reality,” NZBA chief executive Roger Beaumount said.
It had been complex and expensive work, with security among the issues that needed to be addressed. Two banks, ASB and Westpac, have pledged no API fees for at least the first 12 months.
This week, Kiwibank said it had partnered with a local firm, Wych, to implement open banking – and that it “will not be charging accredited third parties to make standard API requests”.
“This is fantastic news,” Houldsworth said.
“And a really important detail is that Kiwibank are the only bank so far who have ruled out API fees on standard data permanently. Westpac, ASB have so far only offered a 12-month waiver.”
He added in a nod to Kiwibank’s chief executive, “This is what leadership looks like. Thank you, Steve Jurkovich.”
The bad news: Kiwibank is running six months behind the other major banks and won’t implement open banking until June next year.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
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