A bill for a million writes, after 23,267 of them
A storage bill that should have been zero, traced to a storage class with no free tier and a price that rounds up to the million.
The storage bill came to $10.81 for the month. The invoice showed 23,267 write operations, and charged $9.00 for them, which is the price of a million. Reads were charged $0.90 the same way.
Both buckets were on the Infrequent Access storage class. It has no free tier, and its operations are billed in whole millions, so the first write of the month costs the same as the millionth. The standard class includes a million writes, ten million reads and 10 GB of storage every month, and nothing here came close to any of them.
Nearly all the traffic was a log collector: about 26,800 writes, 1,700 lists and 28,500 object checks a month. The other bucket holds backups and sees 15 to 30 writes a month. On Infrequent Access that one bucket alone would still cost $9.
No uploader config or collector script on any machine set a storage class. Each used the bucket default, so the default was the only setting that mattered, and the account log showed it had been changed during the billing period.
Both buckets now default to standard, and a test upload landed as
STANDARD. Older objects stay put, because object lock will not let them be
rewritten. They cost a fraction of a cent.
The free tier was never the limit. The rounding was.