Trace a recurring cloud charge across repositories and logs
At a glance
Justin Davis used Claude Code and Google Cloud MCP access to locate and disable a forgotten billable job. This workflow is listed under Cloud Costs, Scheduled Jobs, Debugging.
- Agents / tools
- Claude Code, Google Cloud MCP, Cloudflare Workers
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What they did
1) Gather the billing notice, service category and usage timing. Give Claude Code access to the suspected repository and a Google Cloud MCP connection authorized to inspect the relevant projects and logs. 2) Ask it to investigate the recurring charge. Use your own project knowledge to question its first explanation; Davis's initial answer blamed a family-newsletter project. 3) Inspect that repository to test whether it actually calls the billed API. After finding it did not, expand the investigation across other cloud logs and projects and match scheduled activity to the billing pattern. 4) Inspect the identified job and its API request fields. Disable the unwanted schedule and confirm the configuration change. The author's actual culprit was a Cloudflare Worker Sunday sweep making roughly 1,000 Places Text Search calls with expensive field selections.
How it went
The author reports resolving the investigation within 15 minutes, including about five minutes of human work, and disabling the jobs behind the $144 bill.
Worth knowing
Claude's first confident attribution was wrong; repository inspection disproved it.
