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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/r2c1 on 2025-03-26 06:16:34+00:00.
Check
E.g. what it looks like if you're now being charged as of this month
I thought it was just a scam email today saying I was charged $100 by Google but I actually was! Some months ago I set up a basic "travel time to/from home/work" widget on my HA dashboard. It was configured using the google_travel_time integration and was below the threshold for the free tier as it was then. Skip forward and I'm now noticing in my unread email a message Google sent on 2/9/2025 ("*New usage improvements plus tools to manage your bill
*") indicating in somewhat non-obvious terms that starting 3/1/2025 there would be a reduction in their free rate of API calls. You would have had to remember the rate of calls you had configured before and which category it was in as otherwise the email read like any other API marketing email.
In hindsight it seems a little underhanded to do that to free tier users when obviously Google could have tailored that email to be specific per each account's usage ("you're using x events a month and will be affected") or even sent out an email when their account went from $0/day to any amount of charge to minimize the costs and alert immediately?
I've disabled the google_travel_time integration until I can switch it to custom polling intervals and be sure I'm within the free tier. Also I'll try to request a refund of the billing charge otherwise this was an expensive lesson for me.