Vertext AI Notebooks - Workbench management fees application

[_asya_]

Hello!
I am a new data engineer in a long-standing data analytics team working on cost cleanup. We are using Vertext AI Workbench notebooks (mostly with the following configuration: E2 / 4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM). We also have a few shared BigQuery Notebooks (they are supposed to be billed similarly). We have noticed that we are being billed approximately 6 euros per day for "Notebooks", including weekends when the notebooks are not in use (they are stopped after 3 hours of idle time even if people forget to do it).

Can these charges be related to the Workbench management fee that applies regardless of Notebook activity status? Are there any other potential sources of these charges that we should be aware of? It's not clear from documentation where constant charges can come from, quite the opposite - it says "Pay for what you use", but this is not our experience.

[jaia]

Hello,

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[_asya_]

We found out that the charges are indeed related to the Workbench management fees, which apply even to inactive notebooks. It seems these fees are incurred regardless of the notebooks' activity status.

As a result, we are now more strict about deleting notebooks that are not actively in use to avoid unnecessary charges. This seems to be helping, but we're still closely monitoring our costs to ensure everything is aligned with our usage.