Ask HN: Lambda Labs 390x bill

2 points by xiphias2 19 hours ago

Hi HN,

I signed up to lamda labs because I wanted to try their GH200 instance which I couldn't in Google Colab.

I started the instance, went inside Jupyter and played with it, forgot about it.

Now they hit me with a $583 bill:

,,your account had a running 1xGH200 instance attached to it from 3/9/2025 through to 3/25/2025, for a total of 391.32 hours of usage totaling $583.06. Lambda does not distinguish between idle and in use instance states, so any time that a running instance is attached to a customer's account will be billed for.''

I told them that it was a mistake and I didn't even log into the instance, just tried some models from Huggingface for 1 hour, but it seems like they genualy don't care of 390x overbilling me.

I asked them whether other people who just tried them had this problem and suggested them to auto-stop instances and limit them by default, but the support person hasn't answered this.

They seem like a very shady company for this amount of overbilling. I can of course tell this to my bank and issue a charge back, but is there some other way to handle this? I wouldn't have had problem paying a few hours more than my usage, but this bill looks outrageous to me for the amount of compute I used.