Vertex AI Grounding Cost Gap: Diagnosing the Missing $1300 on My Solo VM

Vertex AI Grounding Cost Gap: Diagnosing the Missing $1300 on My Solo VM Running a full AI product solo on a single small VM means every dollar counts. Recently, I noticed a jarring discrepancy in my Google Cloud Platform (GCP) billing for Vertex AI. The admin dashboard showed around ₩400,000 for the month, but the actual GCP bill was closer to ₩1,740,000. That's a nearly ₩1,300,000 gap – a significant chunk of change I couldn't account for. I needed to figure out where this money was disappea...