I used Google cloud for only one thing and one thing only, from January 2023 until today: installing the 1-click wordpress installation.
Nothing else, with my knowledge, was installed or added other than the one instance of Compute Engine, mirco, 1 gb which is part of the Free Tier.
I have google analytics connected to my website and it says that I've had zero visitors since January (not even I myself have accessed my site since installing it, due to being busy). So thus I am definitely within the threshold of the "free tier" max bandwidth/usage, and my disk space is well under the 1 GB limit as well.
Yet even though I have had no visitors to my site in the past 4 months, I see today when reviewing my reports that every month since I installed wordpress, I was charged at least $2 per month.
What's even funnier, is that my domain expired on March 27th, and even though my domain expired, which literally means that the entire month of April my website simply did not even exist anymore, I was STILL charged $1.76!!
When talking to billing they have no idea why. They didn't understand English or something. Or just confused. One of the 5 people I talked to told me that she thought it was because of an API that was apparently installed without my knowledge... and when I asked if this API was required for wordpress, she told me no it was not. So then why was it installed in the first place?? Who knows if what she says was true... problably not because the other 4 people i talked to afterward had no idea what i was talking about and said the only API was compute Engine's API.
So if there is an API that comes with Compute Engine only (and not wordpress), then why does it say all over the docs that Compute Engine is part of the free tier, if it's true that the API WAS THE REASON why I was charged?
Or if this API is required with a wordpress installation, then why do both the Free Tier docs and the Wordpress docs not mention that this API that charges money, is a requirement to run wordpress? Shouldn't we be forewarned that installing wordpress would cost money, especially since a lot of people are attracted to the Compute Engine free tier?
As you can see, this is really confusing and frustrating. Everywhere I look online says that people have been able to have a free wordpress site using free tier on Compute Engine. Maybe that has changed though since January? I would really appreciate an explanation.
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