How to make GCP billing changes ?

If you make changes to your billing when purchasing Aura through GCP market place you need to be aware that not doing the operations in the proper way can terminate your AuraDB Instance.

As a general rule please follow the GCP guidelines here

If you've made purchases from Google Cloud Marketplace in your project, be sure to make those same purchases in the new Cloud Billing account before switching the project

Safe changes to perform

Changing billing account credit card 
This is safe to do as described here

Changing the GCP billing email address

This is safe to do as described here

Move project from one billing account to the other but the new billing account already has a subscription to Neo4j Aura
This is safe to do, as described in this GCP guide

The GCP document suggests the following:

"If you've made purchases from Google Cloud Marketplace in your project, be sure to make those same purchases in the new Cloud Billing account before switching the project"

However, since subscriptions/purchases have to made through a project and not directly through a billing account, we suggest the below steps:

1. Create a new Billing Account as desired
2. Create a new Temporary Project
3. Link the Temporary Project created in Step2 to the newly created Billing account
4. Subscribe to Neo4j Aura in this temporary project.
   Please make sure you choose the new billing account in the "Purchase Details" section.
5. Enable the Neo4j Aura API.
   You don't have to create a Neo4j Aura instance.
6. Change the Billing of your actual project to the new Billing account.

Using these steps, you could change billing for your existing projects to the new Billing account without data loss.

Note: Feel free to shut down the temporary project you have created in Step 2.

Unsafe changes to perform:

Move project from one billing account to another (without purchasing Neo4j Aura in the target account)
This will send to Aura the message that your GCP project is terminated and all AuraDB Instances will be deleted. 

Close / Delete a live billing account
These are of course unsafe and will terminate your AuraDB Instances.

Important Note:
Reopening a closed billing account will not allow you to recover a deleted AuraDB Instance if you have performed any unsafe changes listed above.

To get help in case of error, please open a support ticket and we will do our best to help you recover your AuraDB Instance where possible. We advise to reach to us within 24 hours of the change to allow for best results.