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Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

• nikanj 11mo ago
  This reminds me of the ”I just want to serve 5 terabytes” thing Google does not want your money, they don’t know how to count so low
  • kevindamm 11mo ago
    Broccoli Man! classic https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI (2010) To be fair, a lot of this changed after that video became a meme.. but I'd bet that the broccoli man template is still trending on memegen
    • vessenes 11mo ago
      And the remaster! https://mbleigh.dev/posts/broccoli-man-remastered/ https://mbleigh.dev/posts/broccoli-man-remastered/
      • CamperBob2 11mo ago
        Hey man, nice slop! (No, really, that's great.)
• athrowaway3z 11mo ago
  I didn't even need to read the article to upvote, and doing so just confirmed my assumption that somebody finally wrote down their frustration with Gemini. My fucking god, how has Google not flagged the failure of onboarding devs like Claude / Codex? 3 days ago I was literally thinking, I want to throw 20$ to try out Gemini alongside my Claude and Codex subs. It took me a few minutes to realize its just not worth my time to figure out how.
  • mox1 11mo ago
    I wanted to try Googles Image generation models, to compliment my Claude API sub. Holy Crap, I got about 45 minutes into setting up billing and just gave up and un-did everything. Hint: If you want to put a spending Limit on your google cloud account, its not trivial. I will say that Stability AI is similar to Claude, they will just let you buy credits and hit an API.
    • madiele 11mo ago
      Had the same problem, wanted to use gemini but wanted to setup a speeding limit, turns out Google would prefer you to risk bankruptcy for a mistake, no spending limit available from what I understood, ended up going with openrouter and using gemini through them instead
• h02 11mo ago
  Just wait until you find out that Tier 1 only gives you up to 250 requests a day, and if you want more than that you'll have had to have spent over $250 in Google Cloud spend, and your first payment has to be more than 30 days ago. I was going to build my side project using Gemini 3 Pro, but gave up after that.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• notepad0x90 11mo ago
  I think they're just too focused on enterprise billing. Someone at google doesn't get that individuals trying it out is how they go their work and recommend this stuff. Googlers tend to exist in an isolated bubble. In the corporate world, Azure is the default and they have Azure OpenAI. Why would someone bother with Gemini? Unless the devs at companies have a good experience with it of course. Googlers are awesome/mean well, if only enough of them lurked here :)
  • marcuskaz 11mo ago
    Developer experience matters. This is what Vercel figured out and why their admin screens are sooooooo much better than anything AWS or Google creates.
    • 9rx 11mo ago
      "Developer experience matters" and "Vercel" being the example is something I never thought I would see together. I actually do agree that Vercel's admin screens are quite good compared to the other usual suspects. But I don't consider that to be on the development side of things. It's done decently well because it is geared towards the business folks who are paying the bills. Developers writing code on top of the development solutions produced by Vercel have been completely forsaken.
      • marcuskaz 11mo ago
        :thinking-face: - How builds and deploys are configured - The simple aspect of connecting a GitHub repo and you get auto deploys - Auto creating branch environments that make testing as easy as a new link - Just configuring users and permissions and not seeing IAM anywhere is a huge win My billing admins don't do any of this stuff.
        • 9rx 11mo ago
          None of those are development tasks. IT tasks, I'd buy, but anyone deeply entrenched in IT are more likely going to want more powerful tools (even if harder to use). Vercel is geared towards the small groups where there are some developers on staff, but the budget makers are playing double-duty in IT roles.
• Havoc 11mo ago
  Yeah can't figure out WTH is going on in google's AI ecosystem either. They absolutely deserve credit for their free tier API keys though. That's unheard of in big cloud - an actual you can't shoot yourself in the foot with a life ruining bill thing. Can't recall what part of their product maze I got it from but it seems to do what it says on tin
  • BoorishBears 11mo ago
    You can sum it up as: Gemini from AI Studio and Gemini from Vertex AI Studio have independent rate limits. - And I guess to add some context, it's because Google seemingly realized that Google Cloud moves so glacially slow, and has so much baggage, that they could no longer compete with scrappier startups like OpenAI and Anthropic on developer mindshare. So there's a separate product org that owns AI Studio, which tries to be more nimble, and probably 50x'd Gemini adoption by using API Keys instead of Service Accounts and JSON certs that take mapping out the 9th circle of hell to deploy in some environments. (although iirc Vertex now has those) They definitely do ship faster than Google Cloud, but their offerings actually end up feeling like a product team with fewer resources than OpenAI or Anthropic (like shipping purple tailwind-slop UIs as real features), which is just nuts.
  • impure 11mo ago
    The free tier is good but they've been cracking down on rate limits. Just recently they significantly dropped the max requests per day.
• tigranbs 11mo ago
  Yeah, then try adding more quotas to scale your usage; you will feel the pain! But, to be fair, it is way easier than the AWS Bedrock or Microsoft Azure!
  • cj 11mo ago
    Isn't OpenAI equally annoying? I remember multiple waiting periods, and multiple requirements to cross spend thresholds to increase in tiers. I remember at one point spamming the OpenAI API with garbage just to consume credits in order to get to the next tier to increase rate limits. More recently (couple months ago) I tried using a 3rd party client for ChatGPT which needed a OpenAI API key. I gave up after 20 mins.
    • ipaddr 11mo ago
      The OpenAI api key generation was simple and using it no problem. No different from stripe. The limits are annoying.
  • arielcostas 11mo ago
    I'd say Bedrock is the easiest since you just log into your AWS account, get an AWS credential in the same way you would for any other service (if you're on EC2 it's even easier) and call the endpoints from the SDK. Azure though...
  • semi-extrinsic 11mo ago
    I recently had the distinct displeasure of being the first to set up a service in Azure on a new tenant at Microsoft. Of course I first had to faff about adding the company credit card, which took five tries and two days. Then I found I had to create the appropriate resource group, before I could set up a service. Fair enough, it might make sense later to have costs divided up like that. After I got the resource group, I then thought to start simple and spin up a single VM. This gave me an error message saying that my request exceeded the quota. Which quota? The built-in copilot in Azure chewed on the raw error in its JSONness, and helpfully told me I could find the Azure quota page by searching for it in the Azure portal. Once I entered the quota page, I was greeted with a message saying that I was now in the new quota experience in public preview mode. After many clicks I found the appropriate line for the desired VM SKU in the desired region, where it said I had used 0 of the quota of 30. So why didn't it work? I tried to request an increased quota, just in case. That process spent five minutes on "please wait", then failed with a generic error message. At that point I started googling around, and eventually in some forum thread I found the missing piece: my resource group did not yet have a subscription. After more faffing about, I got a subscription associated with my resource group. What is a subscription, you ask, and what is the relation between a tenant, a subscription and a resource group? I haven't the foggiest, but I've clicked enough buttons to make the errors go away. Por ahora.
• aerhardt 11mo ago
  I had to warm up a Gemini API project worth a few thousand hours during weeks so that I could get to the tier that allowed me to carry out the workload. How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?!
  • throwup238 11mo ago
    > How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?! Another rate limit in the wall.
    • SamvitJ 11mo ago
      Clever :)
• dannyobrien 11mo ago
  The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting the same treatment as more faceless, distant big businesses. I have a friend that says Google's decline came when they bought DoubleClick in 2008 and suffered a reverse-takeover: their customers shifted from being Internet users and became other, matchingly-sized corporations.
  • Sevii 11mo ago
    That has definitely changed. Google AdWords today is one of the most unfriendly services to onboard I've ever encountered. Signing up is trivial, setting up your first ad is easy, then you instantly get banned. Appeals do nothing. You essentially have to hire a professional just to use it.
    • fersarr 11mo ago
      My attempts always had validation issues that stopped the ads from running but I never figured it out and stopped trying
    • binsquare 11mo ago
      Also adding onto this, it is impossible to get human support! One of my co-workers left with an active account and active card but no passwords noted. The company gave up and just had to cancel + create a new account for the next adwords specialist.
    • LiamPowell 11mo ago
      Yet it's still absolutely inundated with scams and occasionally links that directly download malware[1] that they don't action reports on. I don't think the process needs to be easier if they already can't keep up with moderation. [1]: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR12938769556804993025?region=anywhere https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR129387695568...
• nl 11mo ago
  You literally cannot buy Antigravity with a non-personal Google account. I read someone on here who is using Gemini via OpenRouter because it was the only way they could pay for it.
  • inquirerGeneral 11mo ago
    [dead]
  • verdverm 11mo ago
    I'm using it fine through both aistudio and vertex ai, direct API calls It's not at all hard generally, the core of this issue is centered around gemini-cli which is a hot pile of trash. The inability to get keys or account credentials (like why even use an API key, Google is top notch in auto-auth/WIF) Insanity to me how gemini-cli is so bad at the basics with so many great Google packages in open source that handle all this transparently. All I need to do is have my gcloud authd with the right account/project. I sarcastically assume his is because they vibe coded gemini-cli and it implemented everything from scratch, missing out on reusing those great packages
    • nl 11mo ago
      > I'm using it Do you mean Antigravity or Gemini? If you mean Antigravity then.. how? Their docs say you can't do this. If you mean Gemini then I personally haven't had issues but haven't tried to productionize a Gemini app. The OPs account seems to reflect other comments here.
      • verdverm 11mo ago
        I already said how I'm calling Gemini > direct API Calls I suspect Antigravity to be a big flop like gemini-cli. They are so bad in this area they couldn't even write an extension or fork oss-code, instead spending $2B to pork an open source project with someone else's branding
• axi0m 11mo ago
  Gosh, this story resonates so much with me... I had the exact same experience few days ago, desperately trying to get a small agent prototype working for a quick demo. I spent an good hour dealing with that pile of nonsense. Online payments and accounts management have been mastered for 20 years now, why do we still have to endure such things? It just kills me. The same goes with Azure (and all MS online-related services), if not even worse.
• modeless 11mo ago
  Seems like the real problem is something about his account or credit card tripped some fraud detectors and he got stuck in a part of the system designed to prevent credit card fraud rather than facilitate legitimate use. I can certainly imagine that Google gets a lot of chargebacks from people who had their credit card numbers stolen to mine bitcoin or whatever on Google Cloud.
  • jwrallie 11mo ago
    Having moved from one country to another, I tripped all kinda of anti fraud systems and the only way out was to share my ID with every other company. It’s annoying but one common thing is that anti fraud systems seem to require humans in the loop, so it’s better to give up and get back to it next day. The most annoying company I dealt with was Blizzard. I just wanted to play a game but it took days of back and forth, meanwhile I started to play something else and lost interest.
• rtaylorgarlock 11mo ago
  Interesting perspective. I've mainly felt like i have 'American privilege' regarding the ease with which i open accounts of basically any sort on a whim, usually with little friction.
  • mrj 11mo ago
    Oh no, this is just a Google thing. I've done the same verification bs for four different companies now, multiple times for each of them. I just keep an image of my license on my computer so I can upload it on demand. Google's payment verification is byzantine. It'll trigger when you sign up. It'll trigger if you create an Android developer account. It'll trigger if you get a new phone. It'll trigger if your card expires. It'll trigger the month before your card expires. Why? Fuck you, that's why.
    • mrj 11mo ago
      And it just happened to me again. I got a new phone and my personal payment account went into some verification status and I can't use my wallet. Even though Google itself moved the card. And I was able to add the card and use the wallet with my gmail account. Wtf.
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• neom 11mo ago
  I complained about this on HN recently and Logan responded and asked me to email him with feedback on how I'd like the experience to work (I didn't, sorry Logan, been busy :)) - Logan, to his credit, is very active everywhere reading and soliciting feedback. I think they're going to be giving it a pretty big bump on ux/ui of AI studio next month. It's easy to see he's a super smart guy trying to build something complex within a massive machine - given how focused on the product he appears to be, I have high hopes. https://x.com/OfficialLoganK https://x.com/OfficialLoganK
  • verdverm 11mo ago
    I don't know, he announced on Bluesky that they are dropping a big vibe coding update to aistudio next year 1. cart out in front of the horse a bit on this one, lame hype building at best 2. Not at all what I want the team focusing on, they don't seem to have a clear mission Generally Google PMs and leaders have not been impressive or in touch for many years, since about the time all the good ones cashed out and started their own companies
    • logankilpatrick 11mo ago
      > cart out in front of the horse a bit on this one, lame hype building at best hmmm > 2. Not at all what I want the team focusing on, they don't seem to have a clear mission allow anyone to build with Google's latest AI models, be the fastest path from prompt to production with Gemini
  • mvkel 11mo ago
    This has often been the case (Google dev rel soliciting feedback) and they very rarely take meaningful action. Like firing a bug report with Apple. They'll get to it when it becomes strategically important to. Why making it easier to pay them isn't always strategically important, I'm not sure.
    • magicalhippo 11mo ago
      Dev rel is part of PR department isn't it? At least that's how it has always seemed to me when it comes to these mega corps.
• gxs 11mo ago
  This is a longstanding issue we’ve had, not just with Gemini Even with something as simple as google workspace - permissioning service accounts and authentication are a pain in the ass The docs suck and of course there’s no one to help
• niwtsol 11mo ago
  The article lightly mentions it, but how AWS and Google Cloud Console are so absolute nonsensical in UX and ease of use is beyond comprehension.
  • polalavik 11mo ago
    holy hell google cloud is so confusing i just ended up using (a much more expensive) digital ocean droplet instead for a little project. I guess they only really care about enterprise customers who can burn tons of money figuring it out, but it made me never want to use it again. Same with google ads - super fuckin shit UI/UX, super confusing to understand what is going on. companies like digital ocean, supabase, etc can make money (from people like me) because they just circumvent the bullshit or wrap the dogshit experience (aws) into a much better experience. bless supabase.
    • herpdyderp 11mo ago
      DigitalOcean is such a dream to use. I also really appreciate all their guides for almost everything web server related.
      • sbrother 11mo ago
        How is their managed Kubernetes product nowadays? I've realized all I really use on GCP and AWS is managed Kubernetes and Postgres, and I feel like I must be overpaying particularly for GPU instances.
    • TheTaytay 11mo ago
      Well said. I’m literally afraid of the cloud console dashboards from the big providers. That’s especially true with the quagmire that is AWS. It’s so easy to leave a resource turned on that you are no longer using, and so hard to tell which resource belongs to which project, or have high confidence you set up permissions correctly. They have multiple products whose only job is to monitor and configure your AWS accounts. Multiple. That’s not a brag. That’s an admonition. Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Render, etc, seem to have figured out how to rent millions of dollars of computers and services out every month without requiring you to become “certified” on their platform.
• sirfz 11mo ago
  I find GCP frustrating (coming from AWS) but luckily asking Gemini how to do things makes it much easier.
• consumer451 11mo ago
  Wasn't this type of Google thing clearly called out in the Karpathy Software 3.0 talk? It's interesting to me this UX problem is not readily solved. What is the sticking point in a big org? I don't have a point of reference.
  • chillfox 11mo ago
    It will be politics, it's always politics. Large orgs works a lot like the feudal system.
    • consumer451 11mo ago
      I would like to think that this is why higher level execs get paid the truly big bucks... to cut through all of that. Otherwise, this sounds a lot like "impenetrable government bureaucracy." I thought business was supposed to be better.
• plaidfuji 11mo ago
  > The “Set up billing” link kicked me out of Google AI Studio and into Google Cloud Console, and my heart sank. Every time I’ve logged into Google Cloud Console or AWS, I’ve wasted hours upon hours reading outdated documentation, gazing in despair at graphs that make no sense, going around in circles from dashboard to dashboard, and feeling a strong desire to attain freedom from this mortal coil. 100% agree
  • avereveard 11mo ago
    [flagged]
  • logankilpatrick 11mo ago
    we will have this fixed soon : ) thank you for the patience, have wanted this in AI Studio directly since the day I joined Google!
• arielcostas 11mo ago
  Wait until you see Azure. Apparently you need to create either an "Azure OpenAI" or a "Microsoft Foundry", where AFAIK (got an email last week) Foundry now includes everything AI including "Azure OpenAI", the former "Cognitive Services" (for speech, computer vision and other stuff) and inference on non-OpenAI models. But wait, because once you create that, you are told to go to another portal (ai.azure.com) where you get an "old" foundry experience and anew one that can't be enabled for every project. Oh, wait, did I mention there apparently used to be a "Foundry" and a "Foundry Project"? Oh, and all those apparently work with a single API key, unless (I guess) you set up authentication with the Azure SDK, which makes you go back to Azure Portal (or maybe Entra ID?). All of that while trying to explain to your non-technical boss how he can browse the voices available at "the Azure thingy" to pick his favourites to then pick and use in the project due relatively soon. Since, of course, you told him the original Cognitive Speech Services (or Speech Services, or Cognitive Services-Speech, or whatever they decided to call it on that specific page) semi-public URL where he could browse the gallery was "speech.microsoft.com" which is now semi-dead with awful loading times that seem some server issue and has been happenning for a few months now. Or tell them to go to the "new foundry" where he might not be able to find the resource or might not have stuff in the regions you were using up until then, or whatever crap this 3.56 trillion-dollar company decides to throw at you to prevent you from using their services. And all of this is the exploration phase, where you just use the GUIs and copy things around until they work. Then you need to figure out what you did (and more importantly, where) to be able to write some Terraform/OpenTofu or Bicep or similars to try and keep the environment replicable to avoid the excruciating pain of repeating every single step you followed to get it on a working state. At the very least, Google was nice enough to launch Vertex AI inside GCP for enterprises that have figured that out, and then Google AI Studio as an almost completely separate thing that only is bound to Google Cloud for billing purposes, similar to how Firebase is integrated too.
• obmelvin 11mo ago
  I don't understand the multiple posts / comments I've seen about this. I google `gemini API key` and the first result* is this docs page: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key That docs page has a link in the first primary section on the page. Sure, it could be a huge CTA, but this is a docs page, so it's kinda nice that it's not gone through a marketing make over. * besides sponsored result for AI Studio (Maybe I misunderstood and all the complaints are about billing. I don't remember having issues when I added my card to GCP in the past, but maybe I did)
  • verdverm 11mo ago
    Most of them are correlating gemini-cli experience (trash) with the broader access to Gemini via studio or cloud (not at all a problem)
    • Leynos 11mo ago
      They could always just use OpenCoder, Crush or Goose with OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview)
      • verdverm 11mo ago
        Google has the ADK project, which is really good. Python is the primary implementation, Java is there, Go is relatively new and aiming for parity. They could have contributed the Typescript implementation and built on common, solid foundation, but alas, the hydra's heads are not communicating well These other "frameworks" are (1) built by people who need to sell something, so they are often tied to their current thinking and paid features (2) sit at the wrong level. ADK gives me building blocks for generalized agents, whereas most of these frameworks are tied to coding and some peculiarities you see there (like forcing you to deal with studio, no thanks). They also have too much abstraction and I want to be able to control the lower level knobs and levers ADK is the closest to what I've been looking for, an analog to kubernetes in the agentic space. Deal with the bs, give me great abstractions and building blocks to set me free. So many of the other frameworks want to box you into how they do things, today, given current understanding. ADK is minimal and easy to adjust as we learn things
• postsantum 11mo ago
  Congrats, you have sampled the life of android developer. I've been avoiding touching Gemini exactly for the reason "Your account is in good standing. For now". When it's not, enjoy your ban for life
  • horaceradish 11mo ago
    Apple as well. Apple developer sign up refuses to accept my government issued ID. So fuck them, I decided. Sold all my Apple hardware but phone and watch. Downgraded phone to basic bitch when my last one died
• andy99 11mo ago
  I use OpenAI and Anthropic APIs every day for work. I have never used google Gemini precisely because there seems to be a whole different set of friction involved in getting an account. First I don’t want to tie anything to my google account, especially any form of payment (no idea if I actually need to do this). Second I don’t want AI studio or whatever, I just want a similar api to the others I can hit. I admit I’m completely ignorant about what’s really involved, I have never tried and am just going on vague things I’ve heard but stories like this definitely reinforce my perception. I even have a mistral account, grok, etc, but google feels like a whole other level of complication.
  • 0cf8612b2e1e 11mo ago
    I feel you on not wanting to tie anything additional to your Google account. Will I somehow do something “naughty” (say spam an emoji during a livestream) that gets me permanently banned for life from all services? Google really needs to evaluate separating service bans. I cannot be the only one who would rather go to a competitor than risk angering the black box and destroying my digital life.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
• robertheadley 11mo ago
  I had issues too, I wanted to use my free Google API credits with Roo Code, but I could never get it to work. I eventually got Gemini Cli and now Antigravity to work.
• ryuuseijin 11mo ago
  Just a note that you can use opencode with their API gateway (they call it "zen") to get access to all the most popular models using a single account, including gemini. (Although this wouldn't have helped the author, since they wanted to try the Gemini CLI specifically).
• happyopossum 11mo ago
  The underlying issue here is that 3.0 is still in preview. Once it’s a GA model, you can just use your $20 consumer Ai pro sub and skip all the GCP stuff…
• heystefan 11mo ago
  I had the same experience. Plus you never know what's the best way to use eg. Nano Banana -- it works better in AI Studio versus their regular Gemini chat.
• jpollock 11mo ago
  There is a lot of fraud with UPI, specifically social engineering to obtain UPI OTP codes. Since the card and the account haven't been previously associated, that's probably a risk model saying a human needs to verify the account before activation. Indian cards also (I believe) have a mandatory 24 notice period prior to money being pulled - giving fraudsters a 24 hour starting gun to spend like crazy. That makes merchants that provide variable cost service on credit products twitchy. https://support.stripe.com/questions/background-on-indian-government-regulations-affecting-card-payments#:~:text=E%2Dmandates%20for%20recurring%20payments,any%20time%20through%20their%20bank. https://support.stripe.com/questions/background-on-indian-go...
• koinedad 11mo ago
  I have always found Google products incredibly confusing and difficult to use. I have had a very similar experience to this a number of times.
  • antonvs 11mo ago
    I work with GCP regularly. Once you’re familiar with their approach, it’s straightforward enough. But the situation with Gemini is on a whole different level.
• notatoad 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • BeetleB 11mo ago
    I know it's against HN rules, but ... You really should read the submission before leaving a comment. Or even copy/paste into an LLM to summarize.
• intothemild 11mo ago
  I like using Gemini for general stuff, I have that Gemini AI plan thing, and it's great. But I absolutely will not plug my credit card into Google cloud services, no way.. I know I can put guardrails up, but I just am terrified that I'll get a gigantic bill that I cannot afford. Nope sorry no way. I want a simple $X per month sub. Claude gives me that. Which is why Claude wins.
  • ra 11mo ago
    That's fine but you're missing out, and you're most likely paying waay more than you need to.
    • ipaddr 11mo ago
      Missing out on nothing
• btown 11mo ago
  In case it's helpful to anyone, https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview is useful to know about. Adding another layer on top of Google's own APIs adds latency, lowers reliability, and (AFAIK) doesn't allow batch mode - but if that's tolerable, it avoids the mess that is Google Service Account JSON and Cloud Billing.
  • numlocked 11mo ago
    (I work at OpenRouter) We add about 15ms of latency once the cache is warm (e.g. on subsequent requests) -- and if there are reliability problems, please let us know! OpenRouter should be more reliable as we will load balance and fall back between different Gemini endpoints.
    • btown 11mo ago
      Is batch mode on the roadmap? As the frontier model providers start to think more and more about profitability, and prices/latencies rise as a result, I can see batching becoming more and more necessary for many use cases. Would love to know we can build against the OpenAI batch API and (soon?) have a path towards being model-agnostic.
• g-unit33 11mo ago
  Wait until the 429 error message
  • wosat 11mo ago
    What's really fun is how inconsistent they are with "request" limits, at least with the embedding API. The documentation says "X requests per minute" but what they really mean is "X documents per minute". But their reporting shows requests per minute. So if you are embedding multiple documents per request, you will start getting 429s but the usage dashboard will look like you are nowhere near the limit. Super fun.
    • g-unit33 11mo ago
      It's soo bad haha I think they just put the request limit to give comfort but it's not accurate at all
• rvnx 11mo ago
  Setting up a limit of spending is even more difficult
  • movedx01 11mo ago
    Is that even possible? Last time I checked it wasn't, while it was possible with OpenAI. Since that moment(early this year) - OpenAI has removed that option and their "Project budget" feature turned from being a hard limit into an email notification.
• senthilnayagam 11mo ago
  I am from India, Have had similar experience. After billing they mentioned models which ai was looking were not launched in india ( Veo3 and nano banana ) I use replicate, fal for all api and for LLM openrouter
• deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
• binarymax 11mo ago
  The same billing experience applies to the Google programmable search api. Easy to get a key, but a Byzantine maze to pay for more than the free version.
• eezing 11mo ago
  It looks AI won’t replace software engineers after all.
• levocardia 11mo ago
  Add me to the list of "saw nano banana pro, attempted to get an API key for like 5min, failed and gave up." Maybe I am a dummy (quite possible) but I have seen many smart people similarly flummoxed! You can walk into a McDonalds without being able to read, write, or speak English, and the order touchscreen UI is so good (er, "good") that you can successfully order a hamburger in about 60 seconds. Why can't Google (of all companies) figure this out?
  • JohnMakin 11mo ago
    because the bubble in which googlers exist is inherently user-hostile, even to their own detriment. been like this for a while
    • CGamesPlay 11mo ago
      The difference here is that many of Google's users are cost centers, but in this case Google is being hostile to their profit centers as well.
      • antonvs 11mo ago
        I wonder if they actually see their current users as profit centers. The tech is still being built out, to some extent they just need users to find out how it gets used and to get experience in the space. The real appeal of this entire space is its future potential, so they just may not care that much about providing a good consumer-grade experience at this stage.
  • andy99 11mo ago
    I tried at some point to sign up for whatever IBMs AI cloud was called. None of the documentation was up to date, when you clicked on things you ended up in circular loops that took you back where you started. Somehow there were several kinds of api keys you could make, most seemingly decoys and only one correct one. The whole experience was like one of those Mario castle levels where if you don’t follow the exact right pattern you just loop back to where you started. It makes sense for IBM, seems like google is just reaching that stage?
• squirrellous 11mo ago
  As a former employee, the engineering culture at Google gives me old-school hacker vibes, so users are very much expected to “figure it out” and that’s somewhat accepted (and I say this with fond memories). It’s no surprise the company struggles with good UX.
  • gilrain 11mo ago
    > users are very much expected to “figure it out” and that’s somewhat accepted That sounds like a really fun place to work but a really awful business to be a customer of.
• huevosabio 11mo ago
  This nonsense alone justifies the existence of OpenRouter.
• msp26 11mo ago
  Hi if the Gemini API team is reading this can you please be more transparent about 'The specified schema produces a constraint that has too many states for serving. ...' when using Structured Outputs. I assume it has something to do with the underlying constraint grammar/token masks becoming too long/taking too long to compute. But as end users we have no way of figuring out what the actual limits are. OpenAI has more generous limits on the schemas and clearer docs. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#supported-schemas https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#s.... You guys closed this issue for no reason: https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/issues/660 https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/issues/660 Other than that, good work! I love how fast the Gemini models are. The current API is significantly less of a shitshow compared to last year with property ordering etc.
  • shresbm123 11mo ago
    Thanks for the feedback. Sorry that we closed the bug without giving you a clear indication of why. Let us look into this
• KnuthIsGod 11mo ago
  How long before Gemini is killed by Google and gets a nice grave at Killed By Google ? https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ I give it a single digit number of years.
• arihant 11mo ago
  I think now the Google One AI Pro subscription directly works for raising limits on the CLI? But otherwise, there is an Individual subscription. The problem is it doesn’t work out of the box. You have to create a whole Google Cloud project and attach the API to it to get it to work. Otherwise the CLI would stop logging you in, which it did when the account was free. The worst part is if that cloud project had any code in it, CLI will use it as context on every prompt.
• KerrickStaley 11mo ago
  In my personal experience, OpenRouter makes it easy to call Gemini 3 Pro Preview and other frontier LLMs with very little setup. It’s great for projects where you want to compare different LLMs or have the flexibility to switch. It charges a 5.5% fee on top of the base API price so at scale you would want to switch to directly calling the provider.
• vinhnx 11mo ago
  A few months ago, I had a frustrating experience with the Gemini API while building an AI chat app as a side project. I registered through AI Studio and set up billing via Google Cloud Console, which offered a free trial with $200 in credits or 3 months of API usage. After deploying the Gemini API for my project, I navigated through the numerous settings in Google Cloud Console but forgot to set a billing limit. That month, I was charged over $250 on my credit card, well beyond the free trial allowance. It was entirely my fault for not setting a limit and not reviewing the free trial terms more carefully. That said, while setting up the Gemini API through AI Studio is remarkably straightforward for small side projects, transitioning to production with proper billing requires navigating the labyrinth that is Google Cloud Console. The contrast between AI Studio's simplicity and the complexity of production billing setup is jarring, it's easy to miss critical settings when you're trying to figure out where everything is.
  • edoceo 11mo ago
    It seems that billing here (and elsewhere) for cloud is intentionally opaque. Nearly every client (at scale) is having (one of) a service provider to help manage/audit these usage. Variable costs are great, scale with the business; but visibility is a big (intentional?) challenge.
  • logankilpatrick 11mo ago
    we are bringing billing into AI Studio and adding hard caps by default so you don't overspend
    • vinhnx 11mo ago
      Thank you, Logan! It's a very welcome change! Glad my comment reached you.
• kunley 11mo ago
  > I was fifteen minutes into writing some code by hand like a Neanderthal Tell me this isn't classism. Tell me this kind of narrative isn't a new norm
  • antonvs 11mo ago
    I can’t tell if you might be joking. If you are, the rest of this comment is irrelevant. That general idiom is old and fairly widely used. There was a Seinfeld episode in 1997 in which Elaine talked about “…not lurching around like a caveman.” If you’re objecting to criticism of writing code by hand, the phrase is almost invariably used in a self-deprecating way, acknowledging some inefficiency or old-fashioned behavior with comic hyperbole. It’s not criticizing people who write code by hand as such - the author is criticizing themselves for doing something the hard way.
    • kunley 11mo ago
      Thank you. Seinfeld reference does it. About the "hard way", everything in the article is screaming that OP's new way of coding is the hard way, not the other way around
      • gilrain 11mo ago
        You came in hot with a wrong assumption couched in absolute terms… and, after correction, you’re flouncing out with the same irrelevent message. I’m an AI skeptic, but this ain’t it.
        • kunley 11mo ago
          I see I am dealing with people treating the topic in a religious way. OP explains his enormous and ridiculous struggles yet you say it is irrelevant.
      • antonvs 11mo ago
        Isn’t it just the Gemini key aspect that’s hard? That’s not specific to this way of coding, just to Google’s half-baked mish-mash of offerings. He should have used OpenAI or Anthropic - instead of using Google, like a Neanderthal.
• ankit219 11mo ago
  Think its a combination of factors. - Google cloud is setup for big organizations. Not for individuals. All cloud providers are pretty much confusing in a similar way. - India has specific rules re cybersecurity and financial regulations that Google has to comply. (mandatory id verification and kyc compliance). Others have asked for an id check too. From what confused me, if OP wanted to use a model, the easier way would have been to pay cursor/windsurf etc. and select that model. Usually that is how people try out a new model. Trying out a specific way means going through the norms every country imposes, and bloat in case of legacy products. AWS and Azure have come up with their own models. If their future versions hit close to sota and people want to use it, many would end up in a similar loop (and woudl be easier to just use it from the aggregators).
• doctorpangloss 11mo ago
  Not being able to sign up for stuff is in the same league as being perpetually low on disk space.
• Ozzie_osman 11mo ago
  I was recently (vibe)-coding some games with my kid, and we wanted some basic text-to-speech functionality. We tested Google's Gemini models in-browser, and they worked great, so we figured we'd add them to the app. Some fun learnings: 1. You can access those models via three APIs: the Gemini API (which it turns out is only for prototyping and returned errors 30% of the time), the Vertex API (much more stable but lacking in some functionality), and the TTS API (which performed very poorly despite offering the same models). They also have separate keys (at least, Gemini vs Vertex). 2. Each of those APIs supports different parameters (things like language, whether you can pass a style prompt separate from the words you want spoken, etc). None of them offered the full combination we wanted. 3. To learn this, you have to spend a couple hours reading API docs, or alternatively, just have Claude Code read the docs then try all different combinations and figure out what works and what doesn't (with the added risk that it might hallucinate something).
  • CSMastermind 11mo ago
    Some other fun things you'll find: - The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI. - The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry logic is basically mandatory. - API performance is heavily influenced by the whims of the Google we've observed spreads between 30 seconds and 4 minutes for the same query depending on how Google is feeling that day.
    • DANmode 11mo ago
      So, not something for a production app yet.
    • ianberdin 11mo ago
      Even funnier, when Pro 3 answers to a previous message in my chat. Just making a duplicate answer with different words. Retry helps, but…
      • YouAreWRONGtoo 11mo ago
        [dead]
• CSMastermind 11mo ago
  It's so terrible. I cannot tell you the hours I've wasted trying to find a way to see all the Gemini API keys generated in my organization and I have been unsuccessful. I've tried AI Studio, GCP, and Google Admin. We've reverted to everyone at the company just using the API key I created because I can't figure out a way to give anyone else visibility into keys and usage.
• guelo 11mo ago
  Not just gemini, my sense is that many of google's products are collapsing in terms of confusing features and quality. I use to be a fanboy but I've been painfully extracting myself from their ecosystem, more because of the constant churn of product issues than because of any political issues. I suspect it's an instance of conway's law where the org chart has become a disaster after all the layoffs and reorgs.
• SamDc73 11mo ago
  A while back it took me around ~20 minutes to figure out how to subscribe to Gemini CLI and when done I couldn't even verify within the CLI …
• lxe 11mo ago
  I always wondered how something like AWS or GCP Cloud Console admin UIs get shipped. How could someone deliver a product like these and be satisfied, rewarded, promoted, etc. How can Google leadership look at this stuff and be like... "yup, people love this".
  • jiggawatts 11mo ago
    A purer, more perfect example of Conway’s Law has never been made more manifest than the myriad AWS consoles, each further partitioned by region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law And see especially “The Only Unbreakable Rule” by Molly Rocket: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY
    • Aperocky 11mo ago
      In defense of AWS consoles, they are derivative of AWS APIs, as such they are really just a convenience layer that will only occasionally string 2+ AWS APIs together for convenience purposes that can be considered distinct feature on the console. That is wholly unlike the problem here where the console and API somehow behaves completely differently.
      • ksimukka 11mo ago
        Along with the public APIs, An AWS service can also have Console APIs that are specifically for the console. These APIs do not have the same constraints as the public api. (My team built the MediaLive service)
  • theflyinghorse 11mo ago
    What are the chances that Google leadership even seen GCP interface outside of a demo once a never?
  • DANmode 11mo ago
    Google doesn’t have leadership, it has shareholders.
• DeathArrow 11mo ago
  It seems like they don't want to make money out of it right now and it was mostly a show off to prove they can do it. That, or massive incompetence.
• Aeolun 11mo ago
  This is exactly my experience with gemini, and exactly why I bounced on the stupid thing. I just don’t have hours to waste on Google’s stupid processes.
  • kkarpkkarp 11mo ago
    And exactly same here. I wonder how much money they lose because of this poor process. I am not going to use Gemini API in foreseen future as I don't want to manage those keys anymore. No matter how good their model is
• ianberdin 11mo ago
  I had even worse experience with Microsoft Azure. In the middle of the path I realized a third-party sales “ultra real Microsoft support, certified” is dealing with me in order to sell me overpriced options.
• rand17 11mo ago
  So you don't like writing "the boring code". What do you expect from writing a CRUD? What would you like to write? What "interesting problems" would you like to focus on? Great sadness will fall upon the industry when the last graybeard dies, who had this arcane knowledge of "writing code". I have bad Player Piano vibes nowdays. Around me devs are beginning to warm up to the idea, that they are not coders (and neither should I be), but "prompt engineers". When I take too much time on a task, when I can't solve a problem with a push of a button, when I muse about copilot hallucinations in my PR - someone usually comes helpfully to tell me, I need better prompting skills. Have you tried this expression? Have you tried more context? Have you tried with this copy pasted magical formula? No creative worker in human history was so overjoyed to devalue his or her work and knowledge in such haste.
  • mittensc 11mo ago
    Other side of the equation: I remember learning C++ with something like valgrind. I would write stupid code, validate, fix stupid issues. Others before me learned the harder way. With LLMs right now I'm learning frontend by just generating the UIs I want. I'm getting the code/mocks and experimenting. It's bad code, i will need to adjust, but it helps immensely as a starting point same as valgrind helped in the past. Trying to learn via searching for info just doesn't work as well with all the flood of spam.
    • rand17 11mo ago
      I do not think that all LLMs are evil; they are valid tools, but it's not a hammer with meta glasses attached to render everything into a nail. I also find it very useful in certain situations - but not in all situations. Two more things. Bad code (in work, in reality, not in a hobby project) is rarely converted into good code. And the last one: in my twenty plus years of being a dev, this is the first year job offers simply just dried up. With bad code being good enough (hey, it compiles! it mostly works!), hopefully you and I will be the lucky few to still be in the business five years later.
      • mittensc 11mo ago
• JonaScott 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• rozap 11mo ago
  I wasted several hours this week going around in the exact same circles. We have a billing account, but kept hitting a gemini quota. Fine. But then on the quota page, every quota said 0% usage. And our bill was like $5. Some docs said check AI studio, but then the "import project from google cloud to AI studio" button kept silently failing. This was a requests per minute quota, which was set at 15 (not a whole lot...) but wouldn't reset for 24 hours. So then I kept making new projects so I could keep testing this thing I'm building, until eventually I ran out. The only way we could get it resolved was to (somehow) get a real human at google on the phone because we're in some startup program or something and have some connection there. Then he put in a manual request to bump our quota up. Google cloud is the most kafkaesque insane system I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Every time I use it I can tell the org chart is leaking.
  • jacquesm 11mo ago
    For the last decade or so I get a second $0.85 monthly bill from google. Nobody at google knows why, but they recommend to leave it because who knows what could be disabled if I block those payments. Interesting detail here is that this is on a bank account that we stopped using in 2017, so the only reason we are keeping that account alive is for these stupid google payments. In the cloud environment there is an invoice for the amounts, but no way to change the billing info to our current account and also no way (not by us, not by google support) to figure out what these payments are actually for... Calling it kafkaesque is giving it too much credit.
    • gikkman 11mo ago
      I recently got an email saying a project I got is at the risk of being disabled because my payment information is invalid. But the card I got registered for it is the same I've had the last two years, and it's still valid cause I used it yesterday. Also, there is no amount due as far as I can tell. I haven't done anything with the project for 6 month, it's just sitting there. No API usage, nothing. So I got no idea what to do to address it. I feel my best option is wait for it to get disabled and try to address it afterwards.
    • kyrra 11mo ago
• bobjordan 11mo ago
  I went through similar song and dance using a paid Gemini code assist “standard” level subscription. I finally got Gemini 3 working in my terminal in my repository. I assigned it a task that Claude code Opus 4.5 would quickly knock out, and Gemini 3 did a reasonably similar job. I had opus 4.5 evaluate the work and it was complimentary of Gemini 3S work. Then I check the usage and I’d used 10% of the daily token usage limit, about 1.5M tokens on that one task. So I can only get about 10 tasks before I’m rate limited. Meanwhile with Claude code $200 max plan, I can run 10 of those same caliber of tasks in parallel, even with opus 4.5 model, and barely register the usage meter. The only thing the Gemini code assist “standard” plan will be good for with these limits are just double checking the plans that opus 4.5 makes. Until the usage limits are increased, it’s pretty useless compared to Claude code max plan. But there doesn’t seem to be any similar plan offering from Google.
• asim 11mo ago
  Unfortunately Google's problem is the product is dictated by the architecture of the APIs and this is an issue for anything they do. At one point long ago every Google product was disjointed and Larry Page told everyone they needed to be unified under a single theme and login. Then over time with the scale of the company you become entirely dependent on the current workflows. To work around it, all of a sudden there's a new UI for a new product and it looks super clean right until you try do something with that login or roles or an API key that has to effectively jailbreak the flow you're in. Painful. It's why startups win. Small, nimble, none of that legacy cruft to deal with. Whoever is working hard to fix these problems at Google KUDOS TO YOU because it's not easy. It's not easy to wrangle these systems across hundreds of teams, products and infrastructure. The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve and the issue is entirely about operating within the limitations of the system but for good reason. I hope they figure out a lot of the issues but at the same time, I hope Gemini just disappears back into products rather than being at the forefront, because I think that's when Google does it's best work.
  • dbuxton 11mo ago
    > The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve It does make you wonder, why not just be a lot smaller? It's not like most of these teams actually generate any revenue. It seems like a weird structural decision which maybe made sense when hoovering up available talent was its own defensive moat but now that strategy is no longer plausible should be rethought?
    • BozeWolf 11mo ago
      And yet google generates around $1.9miljon revenue per employee per year. Which is a lot, almost as good as competitors.
    • asim 11mo ago
      Two reasons. 1 - they print cash through Ads which means there's opportunity or desire to do more things, or even a feeling like you should or can. So new products emerge but also to try diversify the revenue stream. 2 - the continuous hiring and scale means churn, people get bored, they leave teams, they want to do something new, it all bifurcates. It keeps fragmenting and fragmenting until you have this multilayered fractal. It's how systems in nature operate so we shouldn't think corporation's will be any different. The only way to mitigate things like this is putting in places limits, rules and boundaries, but that also limits the upside and if you're a public company you can't do that. You have to grow grow grow and then cut cut cut and continue in that cycle forever or until you die.
• Simplita 11mo ago
  I thought it was just me. The onboarding experience feels unintentionally hostile for new developers.
• krisgenre 11mo ago
  Maybe they want more free users to better train their models and don't care about the money (which they already have in plenty?). In the grand scheme of things, paid users are minuscule. They are probably delighted because of all the free users.
• magictux 11mo ago
  ahah I'm really vibing with this post, I went through the same idea as the OP - wanted to try gemini 3 and/or nano banana - and as soon as I was thrown into the billing management panel of Google Cloud and their whole linking process I bailed.
• aspenmayer324 11mo ago
  It's great that so many smart people are trying to fix this and build something amazing. Let's hope it gets easier for everyone soon!
• journal 11mo ago
  Won't be adding them then. Not worth the struggle from what I read here. You think it's plug-n-play just swap a model id and endpoint, nope, Chuck Testa.
• srijanshukla18 11mo ago
  Yes, tried countless hours and even reached out to google billing support. Doesn't accept UPI or card, runs into an error with both.
• dvorka 11mo ago
  This is so true! But the adventure doesn't end there. I have 2 billing accounts from the past when I was building projects on AppEngine. Annual exercise to keep them alive (even if no action is needed in the end) is of similar complexity. Why do I need these accounts? Because I want to use Google services for which I don't pay.
• arand 11mo ago
  a hack you this went to a can go to you so good hahahahaha§hah§aha
• runtimepanic 11mo ago
  The experience feels fragmented because Google has multiple overlapping developer consoles and product boundaries. Gemini just exposes that underlying fragmentation more clearly than other APIs.
• dsmurrell 11mo ago
  I avoid using Google because their cloud service product is so badly designed.
• wg0 11mo ago
  I love Google's product managers. I love product managers in general but Google's product managers are at a whole another level. And it shows.
• GuestFAUniverse 11mo ago
  Oh, another Google API rant. I knew I never want to use another Google service as soon as I got rclone running with my Google Drive: https://rclone.org/drive/ https://rclone.org/drive/ I rather not waste my time with such abominations. And I don't mean rclone. I don't care about the "history" of that API, or any API. It's like strangers telling you their live's story at the first meeting. Awkward.
• odie5533 11mo ago
  The difficult process is on purpose. You're too small. You're just going to waste their customer support resources and only give them maybe a couple hundred dollars. They're hoping you give up and go away.
  • mijoharas 11mo ago
    We're a reasonably sized company. Recently we needed to change our google cloud payment details. Finance users had changed in the meantime, so I navigate and create an iam user, ok, billing administrator is a thing, great. Oh, they said it didn't work? alright, there seems to be a project billing administrator as well as an organisation billing administrator? weird, ok let's try that. Hmm... it still didn't work? let's look around a little more. Ok, within the billing account (that they're a billing administrator to) and within the organisation (that they're a billing administrator to) there is a tab called "payment users". This seems to be _separate_ from their IAM users, and the person needs to be added there (as well as? instead of? who knows) and _then_ they can change the card details. UX is especially crap here (for google cloud billing). Let's not even get started on the whole vertex vs. aistudio stuff. Also when one of the gemini's came out their python library worked while their curl docs, and their ruby client didn't so we had to read the source of the python library to figure out what it actually did under the hood to test it out. (this was a while ago, I think they might've gotten better since but the documentation/devex was really bad at at the time)
• jwr 11mo ago
  I also tried to make Gemini work with opencode and after spending about an hour in various panels, billing settings, setting up access groups, project groups, and other paraphernalia, gave up. There is Google Cloud, Vertex AI, Oauth which works or does not depending on whatever, all the "groups" and other crap I don't need, overall I just failed. Claude code just works.
• scirob 11mo ago
  Agreed, only thing that kinda makes up for the huge number of steps is that the GCP build in Ai assistant is actually great at telling you what to do via CLI
• phromo 11mo ago
  I had a similar experience. However I gave up before being able to pay. Repeated the story two or three times. This was work for a medium sized Corp and in the end we didn't even give gemini a chance because of this (performance was sufficiently good with competing providers) . Really hope they up their UX.
• windex 11mo ago
  Google's interface, UX and information flow is complete spaghetti. You never know what you will find and where. There is no one you can call either. I suspect they abandon their products because 50% of potential customers abandon their cart due to the workflow.
• crocowhile 11mo ago
  I got a Gemini API key once. I was overcharged £350, took me ages to find a way to file a complain, and at the end they refunded me only the google charges and not the VAT. Never again, thanks.
• sylware 11mo ago
  You should be able to create an API account with a classic noscript/basic (x)html browser (optionally with an email, and that could be an IPv[46] literal email address, you know, self-hosted & DNS free, which is stronger than SPF...). Then to pay for, I should be able to redeem a code bought at my local and physical monetary terminals (no credit card info input on an internet able computer, even if elf/linux and lean classic noscript/basic (x)html web browsers) that to add credits on my account. Like steam. In my country, we even have codes for age verification only (you have physical age verification like when you buy alcohol from a [bottle] shop), much easier to crack down on abuse. Another thing could be a public "anonymous", severely rate limited, API key for 'testing purpose' or very rare usage, or a noscript/basic (x)html web site (namely a real and honest web site) with ads (text/image/videos[<video>])... and with solid handling of HTTP refresh? My main usage for AI would be coding. I am craving at mass porting C++ to a plain and simple subset of C code (it seems some people are getting reasonably good results, and it seems rust has a brain damaged syntax on the scale of c++), and assembly coding with very specialized code snippet.
• bambax 11mo ago
  I went through the same nightmare a couple of months ago; in frustration I sent a not very nice email to support. They did respond a week later, saying everything was "fixed". But by that time I had moved on, and will probably never come back. But I wonder how it can happen that a bunch of obviously extremely smart people can create such absurd Rube Goldberg machines -- without the fun part.
  • brap 11mo ago
    Leadership roles, especially in large corporations, often favor people who are opportunistic. They don’t care about the product, they want that promo. And to win that promo you have to ship big and ship fast. So often times what you see is people delivering vaporware that has the appearance of high quality (lots of promises, looks amazing in the slides deck, carefully selected data shows great numbers, etc). It’s a gamble, and sometimes it pays off. By the time people accept that it’s hot garbage, the leaders have already moved on to the next opportunity. And it’s not that they were able to fool their managers, because their managers are playing the same game on an even larger scale, so they care even less. Of course, this is not always the case. But there is a bias, and it tends to show up more in large organizations (government, large corporations, etc.)
• erdemo 11mo ago
  I am glad to see someone write about this, google API dashboards are ... crap.
• temp1611 11mo ago
  Google is the most political, extractive and dysfunctional cloud from a customer point of view. 1. Startup credits require multiple follow-ups, meetings, etc. And these reps have weird incentive structures (so they are trying to bypass each other to meet their quotas or whatever). 2. Billing is opaque, you get charged for things you haven't used 3. Support is outsourced - and it takes 4-5 exchanges with this external vendor come to the central issue (by then usually people just give up I guess) 4. Overall behavior from various Google staff has been high-handed - to say the least Every other cloud provider has done better than Google in our experience - AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, OVH - all of them are better to deal with. I like to tell my team there are two G's in our life: (1) Google and (2) Government, and these days the second G often does better than first :)
  • thecupisblue 11mo ago
    >Startup credits require multiple follow-ups, meetings, etc. And these reps have weird incentive structures (so they are trying to bypass each other to meet their quotas or whatever). Man, I tried going for the credits. I've organised meetups and conferences for Google, gave talks, been a part of Google Startup campus for years now, have been invited to participate in GDE program, and as I'm making a GenAI startup I decided "well, maybe time to try getting those 300k cloud credits, I've given them so much I'll surely get it". Well, the first person I talked to, said I'm denied, because they didn't even check the websites I added in the description. They said oh I need to add it to another field for their team to see, told me to update it, but there is no way to update it. Then we had a second call, they said it's okay I can ignore that and pointed me to another person who will be my "account manager". That person was absolutely uninterested into what we're doing, what we want and what we plan to do. They did not even care about helping us much until we reached 15k monthly spend or so, giving a holier-than-thou attitude and sounding like they're making lunch during the call. I'd rather have the call with an LLM at this point. Then even though our website says our product relies on AI, it is impossible without AI and I explained to him how and why we train custom models and use their GenAI products - the person decided we are not an AI company and can only get 2k in Cloud credits. The interaction left such a sour taste in my mouth that I will _never_ use Google Cloud in our product, as I do not want to have to deal with the Account Manager.
• lysecret 11mo ago
  I see this, a hot take form my side as someone who is bought in to GCP i quite like being able to put everything on the same billing account / handle it easily through service accounts.
• francoispiquard 11mo ago
  I think they are trying too much to have you jump on GCP. Having a simpler UI with a credit limit (maybe even at a different rate) would actually get more people to use it imo.
• therealmarv 11mo ago
  Try to get a Google Vertex API key working locally. It's even more complicated. Took me literally one full day to get the whole toolchain working (had to do some pauses out of frustration). I only went through it because I got once 300 USD for free to spend on my Google Workspace account I/my business owns. OpenAI API usage is so much easier. Btw Google: Fix Google Console API usage dashboard... why is there a delay of 2+ days? Why cannot I see (and block!) the usage of the current day?
• rodolphoarruda 11mo ago
  Using metaphors is dangerous, but I would dare to say that big tech AI is like cement suppliers. It's too low level of a service. In civil engineering you have the option to contract value added suppliers that will give you prefabricated pieces in concrete or steel you could be using to build your construction. I'm seeing a lot of AI firms building value added services on top of big tech "foundational" AI offerings. Value addition can start very early at a clear plans/billing structure, going through rate limiting, documentation and extra features that will bring stability or consistency to our AI enhanced products. Going the other way around (I tried) and building things on top of big tech AI is challenging starting at the fundamentals as the OP described well.
  • wongarsu 11mo ago
    Openrouter is roughly at that level of value-add. With plenty of competition now, since being able to charge 5% on your AI spend just for having sane billing, spending controls (actually enforced per-api-token budget limits!) and easy sign-up is an insanely profitable business proposition On the other hand I think it's fair to criticize the model hosts for not offering the same
    • numlocked 11mo ago
      (I work at OpenRouter) Certainly for individual developers / hobby projects that's the primary value prop; super easy access to all of the models. But there's a lot more functionality that becomes relevant when building in production. We do automatic fallbacks, route between providers based on data policies, syndicate your data to agent observability tools / your logging platform of choice, user-level and api-key-level budget management and model allow/block lists, programmatic API key management, etc, etc. More good stuff shipping all the time!
• h33t-l4x0r 11mo ago
  Did you ask Gemini how to do it? ducks rotten tomatoes-
  • gilrain 11mo ago
    Yes, that’s part of the article you didn’t read.
• homakov 11mo ago
  i wasted an hour setting up a key. Antigravity rejected me even though my VPN was set to New York. Nowhere close to claude/codex experience. Unusable dev experience
• twsted 11mo ago
  Same for me. Tried just a few days ago and, frustrated, gave up.
• tgtweak 11mo ago
  Have you looked at getting an openai api key for gpt5? you have to do selfie-ID verification...
• drob518 11mo ago
  Yea, I went through this exact fiasco a few months ago trying to do the same thing. Or rather, I went through the first two-thirds of it and then gave up.
• Arubis 11mo ago
  Similarly to DeepSeek, this—more than dealing with different APIs and routing—is the problem OpenRouter actually solves for me.
• nkotov 11mo ago
  I had a similar experience with GCP / Google Workspace. It's just bad experience.
• scosman 11mo ago
  Gemini API keys are an absolute delight compared to VertexAI. It’s like Google decided the most important part of competing with AWS was a horrific console.
• butterlesstoast 11mo ago
  Similar experience for our business
• martythemaniak 11mo ago
  1. I typed "How do I get a gemini api key" in my chrome bar 2. Firs line in the top result said "click here and then click the Get Key Button". I clicked the link and went to the page. 3. On the page I clicked "Get Key" 4. I named the key, then selected "New project" from the dropdown. I named the new project 5. I now have a key. I actually timed myself, it took 34 seconds. This is a garbage ragebait post.
  • hollerith 11mo ago
    You have a key that lets you chat with 2.5 Flash (often enough to satisfy my personal chat needs). Now get a key that lets you chat with version 3 (Fast or Thinking) without severe rate limiting.
• happyopossum 11mo ago
  There are plenty of ways to get access to gemini - a single google search took me directly to the simplest way (subscribe to Google AI Ultra) in one click: https://one.google.com/intl/en/about/google-ai-plans/ https://one.google.com/intl/en/about/google-ai-plans/ The author apparently found himself on a much more difficult path, one designed for enterprises who are already on google cloud, already have billing set up, etc. The fact that an individuals experience with an enterprise platform isn't great is predictable... That's why there are individual/consumer plans for this stuff.
  • Alifatisk 11mo ago
    The url you sent, when signing up, just sends me to my homepage where I get a overview of my subscription at one.google.com, I can't see where to access a api key
  • 85392_school 11mo ago
    Does it let you use Gemini 3 in Gemini CLI?
• AmazingTurtle 11mo ago
  Yeah and people keep posting shit about how google will win over openai due to their "long breath"
• m3kw9 11mo ago
  is a land min in that UI interface, you never know what you enabled/disabled and get fked over by charges that came out of left field, or why it doesn't work. google continues to be a UX shit show
• logankilpatrick 11mo ago
  Hey! Very valid feedback on setting up a billing account. This is something I have been pushing for over the last 2 years at Google. The good news: setting up billing directly in AI Studio tested internally and will be shipped in January : ) Will follow up on some of the other threads in here!
  • mseri 11mo ago
    Finally! Great to hear. I had the exact same experience, but gave up at the moment of ID verification… too much hassle indeed
  • mrieck 11mo ago
    Will that change also allow paying upfront ($250 or whatever) to bump up a tier? I want to release a service using computer-use but am worried about 429 quota errors if I have actual users.
    • logankilpatrick 11mo ago
      email me and I can get you bumped, but we are also working on prepay to get higher quota up front! Lkilpatrick@google.com
  • whalesalad 11mo ago
    > setting up billing directly in AI Studio tested internally and will be shipped in January Does this mean I can finally use premium features without onboarding my entire google workspace? I made the mistake of getting a good chunk of my family on my google app domain back in ~2007. For the last few years, I spend $80 per month just to host their email because the cost is easier to deal with than the human beings themselves. But I want to use the latest premium Google AI tooling and as far as I can tell the only way to do that is to upgrade my google workspace to the next tier and blow even more $$$ away each month. Suffice to say I have not done this, but it is a blocker from using things like Nano Banana with a non-gmail account.
• arjunchint 11mo ago
  We built an AI Web Agent on top of Gemini. We actually created shortcut for the agent itself to go to AI Studio, create API key, and configure itself haha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ywfLrG_W8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ywfLrG_W8
• cicloid 11mo ago
  Amazon has Q, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot… Names that mean everything, nothing or something based on what website you land or what sales pipeline you are on.
• hnburnsy 11mo ago
  I went through something similar just trying to get my NEST to work in home assistant, thanks to HA these are the well documented steps, and each step has multiple sub-steps... - Create and configure Cloud Project [Cloud Console] - Configure OAuth Consent screen [Cloud Console] - Configure OAuth Application Credentials [Cloud Console] - Create a Device Access Project [Device Access Console] - Enable events and Pub/Sub topic [Device Access & Cloud Console] - Link Google Account It ended up that the linking would not stay persistent, a waste of $5 and many hours.
  • mlrtime 11mo ago
    This is a good reason to pay for the nabu casa subscription, it is worth it! (Not for nest only, just remote access)
• johny115 11mo ago
  you should try figuring out all Google products where you can generate images and videos, even attempt to learn how they work, how does billing work, where it uses credits from or API costs charged to where, what are the differences between all the weirdly named products (AI Studio, Vertex, Whisk, ImageFX, Veo Studio, Flow, etc.) with seemingly overlaping purposes the product description of Whisk at https://labs.google/fx/ https://labs.google/fx/ for example is "Whisk - Create some magic" ... wow, so obvious what it does lot of fun ... especially considering this would be meant usually for non-engineer user Google is bonkers for this ... takes an engineering degree to generate 4K Nano Banana Image outside of Gemini or even to begin understanding why VEO videos look different from each of their different products and why the 3rd party platforms that use their API are 10x easier, put in credit card, choose model and settings, prompt and hit enter