The limit was real. It just wasn't counted where I was standing.
Three was a number nobody showed me
On a Tuesday I tried to spin up a fourth Google Cloud project and got an error I had never seen: quota reached. I had created three projects over a year and a half, one at a time, never thinking of them as a stack. There is no counter anywhere in the console that says three of three. You find the ceiling by walking into it.
The default is three projects per billing account. Nobody warns you, because from Google's side it is not a warning, it is a default.
I have a focus timer on my phone called FocusBottle, and the reason I keep it open is that it does the opposite: you pick 25, 50 or 90 minutes, no account, no settings, and a bottle of light particles dims as your attention drifts. It never tells you afterward that you were distracted. You watch it happen.
I was looking for the wrong quota
So I went to the quota page, and the form offered ten reasons for wanting more projects. One of them reads, roughly, request more resource or API quota in my existing projects. That is the wrong one, and it is the one that sounds right. The limit was never inside a project. It is the number of projects itself, and it is counted per organization, not per Google account.
Every limit in this business is counted in a unit that is not the one you are thinking in. You think in features, the ceiling is counted in projects. You think in hours, the ceiling is counted in what you actually attended to.
Two ways around it, two very different bills
The first is to pay 50 dollars into the billing account to prove you are a real customer. It stings until you notice the money is not a fee. It sits there as credit and gets eaten by future usage, and if you never spend it, you can request a refund from the payment overview page and it goes back to the card.
The second is free and immediate: register a Cloud Identity, verify a domain, and you get a fresh organization with its own three projects. Nothing to pay, nothing to wait for.
I took the free one first and regretted the tidiness of it. Two organizations means two places to look, two sets of permissions, two bills to remember. The 50 dollars was never the expensive option. Scattered is.
The counter you can actually see
What I keep coming back to is not the money. It is that the honest version of this problem was already solved in a much smaller app. Three projects is a quota with no visible counter, so I spent an afternoon discovering it. Twenty-five minutes is a quota with a counter made of light, so I see it in minute nineteen, when I reach for the phone and the particles go dim.
Same limit, different place to look. One of them costs a Tuesday.