Your Deleted VMs in GCP Left Behind 500GB of Orphaned Disks (They're Still on Your Bill) 👻

When you delete a VM in GCP, the boot disk gets deleted. But attached persistent disks? They stay behind. Silently billing you $0.040/GB/month for pd-standard or $0.170/GB/month for pd-ssd. A single forgotten 500GB SSD disk costs $85/month, $1,020/year, for storage nobody uses. Multiply that across your team and you're burning thousands on ghost disks. Here's how orphaned disks happen: Developer creates a VM with an extra data disk Developer deletes the VM (maybe via console, maybe via Terraform) The data disk survives because auto_delete = false (the default for attached disks) Nobody remembers it exists It bills you every month forever This is so common that studies show organizations waste 15-25% of their cloud storage spend on unattached disks alone. A medium-sized company can save $5,000-$15,000 annually just by cleaning them up. Let's find them, clean them up, and prevent it from happening again. 📊 What Orphaned Resources Cost You Resource Type Pricing 500 GB Cost 10 Orphaned = p