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Additional information from Google employee https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2025766889205739899 : "We’ve be

• oger 8mo ago
  While I see the point of limited capacity, it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers. This is ALWAYS the problem with flatrate pricing models. 2% of your customers burn 80+% of your capacity. Did see that in former times with DSL, not too long ago with mobile and now with AI subscriptions. If you want to provide a "good" service for all customers better implement (and not only write in your T&Cs) a fair usage model which (fairly) penalises heavy users. Good on them that they want to provide a way to bring back customers on board that were burned / surprised by their move. BUT: The industry is missing a significant long term revenue opportunity here. There obviously is latent demand and Claws have a great product market fit. Why on earth would you deactivate customers that show high usage? Inform them that you have another product (API keys) for them and maybe threaten with throttling. But don't throw them overboard! Find a solution that makes commercial sense for both sides (security from API bill shock for the customer / predictable token usage for the provider). What we're seeing right now is the complete opposite. Ban customers that might even rely on their account. Feels like the accountants have won this round - but did not expect the PR backlash and possible Streisand effect...
  • lm28469 8mo ago
    > Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers Antigravity has very low daily and weekly quotas unless you pay for their most expensive plan, so it means these people drop $200+ a month to run these bots, insanity
    • embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > so it means these people drop $200+ a month to run these bots It doesn't mean that it's the only thing they're doing, could be they have the plan for other purposes, and also use it for that.
  • embedding-shape 8mo ago
    > Good on them that they want to provide a way to bring back customers on board that were burned / surprised by their move. Are they though? Another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116205) seems to indicate these people are all indefinitely suspended with no path to unsuspend them: > [...] I must be transparent and inform you that, in accordance with Google’s policy, this situation falls under a zero tolerance policy, and we are unable to reverse the suspension. [...]
  • sva_ 8mo ago
    > it also shows that Google did not plan for rate limiting / throttling of high usage customers. There is a (pretty generous and imo reasonable) request quota that reset every 24h
    • hn_throw2025 8mo ago
      There is consensus on r/gemini that the window is a matter of hours now, not 24h. I subscribe to the AI Pro plan. I knew of a published limit of 100 Pro prompts per day, but before this month it seemed they were relaxed about it. I have now started to be rate limited on Pro when nowhere near that quota, due to too many prompts within a short time window (probably due to short prompts and not aggregating my questions). So now I use the Thinking (basically Flash) model and bump up to Pro for certain queries only. There will always be a minority who spoil it for the majority.
      • sva_ 8mo ago
        I don't know why you rely on some Reddit consensus when you can just open Gemini CLI and enter /stats to get the confirmation that you get 200 Pro requests per 24h, and the counter starts when you do your first request. Unless there is something I'm missing
        • hn_throw2025 8mo ago
          If it was a daily quota issue, I would have been notified and unable to use more Pro requests until the 24hr period had reset. This was a temporary rate limit and it told me to try again at a specified time which wasn’t far away. That’s different. However, it could have been because of a temporary capacity issue. I hope so.
          • 8note 8mo ago
            i stopped using gemini altogether for a bit because it was continuously getting capacity issues every evening.
  • zarzavat 8mo ago
    Yeah this is a massive fuckup on Google's part and they are taking it out on their customers as per usual. It's not hard to define a quota system and enforce it. If the quota is too high then reduce the quota. If people are abusing the quota with automated requests then detect that and rate limit those users. If I'm paying $200+ a month I should be able to saturate Google with requests. It's up to Google to enforce their policies via backpressure so that they don't get overloaded. Then again this is the same company that suspended people's gmail because they sent too many emotes in YouTube chat. Sadge.
    • cheonn638 8mo ago
      > If I'm paying $200+ a month I should be able to saturate Google with requests Says who? You? The customer? Who always wants a lower price?
      • zarzavat 8mo ago
        I specifically said that they don't have to fulfil the requests, just that they should be able to accept the requests. Throttling and rate limiting are valid ways to respond to having too many requests. Banning your paying customers' accounts because they sent too many requests is an insane way to deal with having too many requests. Most companies want to make money. They would use this opportunity to upsell these high value customers to a more expensive plan with higher limits. Google, which has some kind of dutch disease from making too much easy money from advertising, sees people trying to give them large amounts of money and thinks "How dare they attempt to buy our services? They're getting banned!"
  • olyjohn 8mo ago
    A fair usage model isn't some handwavey bullshit throttled quota buried in the ToS and marketed as "Unlimited." Its applying a realistic usage quota equally to everybody in the same payment tier that is spelled out right up front so that people know exactly what to expect. The whole concept of service "abusers" is made up bullshit by companies that over promise, over sell and under deliver.
• KronisLV 8mo ago
  > We understand that a subset of these users were not aware that this was against our ToS and will get a path for them to come back on but we have limited capacity and want to be fair to our actual users. It feels like a good default for this would be something similar to video game bans: where you get a "vacation" from the service with a clear reason for why that is, but can return to using it later. Given how much people depend on cloud services, permanent bans for what could be honest mistakes or not knowing stuff would be insane.
  • leetrout 8mo ago
    I posted an "Ask HN" around this a while back. I think we will see a lot more of it and we will be hurting legitimate users. I like your temp ban idea but I doubt they would give reasons why. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40784126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40784126
    • michaelcampbell 8mo ago
      > give reasons why Because it'll be an LLM guided bot handing out bans, so no one will actually KNOW why.
  • DaedalusII 8mo ago
    yes. i am not using google ai services because i am afraid i might accidentally get permanently banned
  • ljm 8mo ago
    Getting your Google Workspace account nuked because an employee hooked their company Gemini account to OpenClaw would certainly be a novel business risk.
    • owebmaster 8mo ago
      what you described is that using google is a novel business risk
• cube00 8mo ago
  > will get a path for them to come back on That's not what support has been telling their $250 a month customers. we are unable to reverse the suspension [1] I get the need to move fast to stabilise the service but similar to an outage it doesn't take much to put a banner on the support page to let customers know bans are temporary until they can come up with a better way of educating customers. Further more it doesn't much to instruct ban appeal teams to tell customers all bans are under review no matter what the reason is to buy them time to separate Claw bans from legitimate abuse bans that need to be upheld. The fact that users are paying $250 for a service they can't use for at least the last 11 days kills any sympathy I had that Google needed "quickly shut off access", it's like they just sat on their hands until the social media storm hit flash-point. After 11 days there still isn't even an official statement, just a panicked tweet from a dev likely also getting hammered on socials, goodness knows how long before accounts are restored and credits issued. Even the original Google employee in the forum thread just ghosted everyone there after the initial "we're looking into it". [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116205 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116205
  • PunchTornado 8mo ago
    come on, using a monthly paid subscription to obtain auth tokens to use claws bots is quite obviously agains T&C. you need to pay api prices for that. I am sure 100% of those knew they were doing something wrong but proceeded anyway.
    • infecto 8mo ago
      Sometimes I wonder where I am when people are so shocked. I genuinely don’t understand who would think this is allowable? Is this simply a younger generation and I am old now? API keys vs the auth tokens smells the same as public vs private APIs, don’t be surprised you get shut off if you are using a private API.
      • ndriscoll 8mo ago
        To the extent that that's true, it would be in the opposite direction? Auth tokens are meant to be used by the User Agent to effect the wishes of user, often encode permissions the user has, and are used with public APIs like those intended for web browsers. API keys are usually for private communication like server to server. The usual expectation is you don't care what agent the user is running. You just care about what they're doing with it (permissions, rate limits, etc.).
• JKCalhoun 8mo ago
  My fascination with local LLMs has waxed and waned over the past year or so. And then something like this comes along and it waxes again mightily. ;-)
• Havoc 8mo ago
  It's a bit leftfield for sure, but "malicious"?
• opsmeter 8mo ago
  [dead]
• FloorEgg 8mo ago
  I wonder if this was causing the increase in the number of 429 errors I've been getting from Gemini on vertex.