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Can you help me understand how it is hard to get an API key from Google? You just head on over to http://aistudio.google.com/api-keys http://aistudio.google.com

Can you help me understand how it is hard to get an API key from Google? You just head on over to http://aistudio.google.com/api-keys http://aistudio.google.com/api-keys and create a key... not any different from platform.openai.com? Disclaimer: I work in Google so it might be that this link is not publicly well known

dogomatic 2mo ago
GCP/vertex is a maze
jjcm 2mo ago
Disclaimer that I haven't tried this since January, so things may have changed in the last 7mo, but this was my experience at that time: https://x.com/pwnies/status/2010523020629274723 https://x.com/pwnies/status/2010523020629274723 At a high level though, as a rule of thumb Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first, and at a human scale second. For other companies it's the opposite. Generally what that means is the first experience you get with a Google product will route you through 8 different dashboards to set up ACLs before you've hired your 2nd employee.
- qlte 2mo ago
  FWIW I definitely did not not need to do anything like that to generate a key via AI Studio. It was like three clicks to get the free tier key, later on enabling billing was a few more plus typing in credit card info.
  - theplumber 2mo ago
    It was 3 clicks because you knew where to look for.
    - abirch 2mo ago
      A pet peeve of mine is that Google doesn't let you search all the options like Apple or Microsoft E.g., I have flashbacks to trying to turn off or on bells in Google Home. A simple search bar would help people trying find API keys, etc.
  - fragmede 2mo ago
    yeah, "enabling billing" is a whole other ordeal. Like it all makes sense, it's not that hard, it's just a lot of extra clicks where the competition doesn't require that. You can blow off this feedback as the user whining, but it's real friction and the competition doesn't have that, so users are going to go elsewhere if they can.
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2mo ago
      I signed up for AWS (SES) recently for the first time and find their whole thing confusing as heck too. Signed into the wrong region and they pretend they don't even know who I am.
- SyneRyder 2mo ago
  Similar experience here, for what it's worth, though I didn't get as far as you. I basically just stopped and didn't bother - it was easier to go through OpenRouter than spend more energy on it. Also: > Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first So much this. I'm currently grandfathered in until the end of the year on Google's Search API, but the $35,000 they want to continue usage of my < 1000 personal searches per month, not going to happen. It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google.
  - mahkeiro 2mo ago
    The current move to force the usage of their AI api from postpay to prepay is also another example. (At least it’s going to give me the last incentive to move to cheaper api)
  - jpadkins 2mo ago
    It's not an assumption that the customer is Google scale that led the $35k monthly price point. It was that you (and many others like you) are breaking the terms of service (which state you are not supposed to store, process or analyze the search results). It was an API built for a different era, that doesn't really exist anymore. > It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google. That's great to hear! FWIW I agree with you that it's harder for independent professionals to get started on Google dev services than others, but the Search API is not developer service and was never intended to be.
    - SyneRyder 2mo ago
      Huh. I'm not storing the Google search results, and my local supplementary index is built from my own crawling, not from URLs from Google searches. But if re-ranking is regarded as processing & analyzing, then I'll remove the Google API calls now (and... done). Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia and EU Search Perspective have certainly been much friendlier to deal with.
- solfox 2mo ago
  > they're serving companies at Google scale first I think that's actually a very interesting insight that would be helpful for PMs on GCloud to take note of. As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco, forcing (I assume most) of their users into a arduous process of removing components they don't need. Google AI Studio is one of Google's solutions to this problem, but in typical Google fashion, it's bolted-on without any clear connection in the ecosystem. If you're also using GCloud, it's hard to remember it's even there. OpenAI's platform, by contrast, is streamlined, easy to use. With Google, I feel like I need to wade through the documentation first before even using the darn thing.
  - echelon 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - deaux 2mo ago
      Sergey's out spending $100 million to lobby against the billionaire tax in California. Lest his net worth shrink from roughly $250 billion to $237 billion. Can't become a pleb now! [0] [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-has-now-spent-100-million-to-fight-the-billionaire-tax/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/google-co-founder-sergey-b...
      - ikiris 2mo ago
        not that I'm intending to defend Sergey here but, if you could spend 0.04% of your net worth to protect 5% of your net worth (and probably all of your easy liquidity)... wouldn't you?
        ryan_lane 2mo ago
        If my net worth were that high? No. Folks need to remember that we're closer to being homeless than we are to being as rich as them. You don't need to defend billionaires.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  Don't forget your account getting flagged for review, so you get to wait an extra 24 hours for no reason.
  - claytongulick 2mo ago
    This happened to me once when I was setting up some virtual servers for a startup. I wanted a typical dev/qa/prod with medium specced boxes. I was denied for quota, with an esoteric process for review. I'd just made a case for deploying to GCP over AWD so got a bit of egg on my face. Went over and had it done on AWS in a few minutes. A couple days later, the Google product team contacted me. I told them what happened. It got escalated, and I ended up on a call with like 5 or 6 people from Google, some very senior. I told them what happened. They made very concerned sounding noises and told me how this was a product failure on their part, how they'd get it corrected, etc... and they'd fixed my account so I could now make the machines. Of course, I was already deployed to AWS at that point. That company grew and ended up with a pretty big cloud spend eventually. Google totally missed it. I was at a new startup a few years later and decided to deploy to GCP. Denied for quota.
- nimchimpsky 2mo ago
  [dead]
- drschwabe 2mo ago
  Literally just built a custom Adsense dashboard based on not integrating with Google's APIs. Every couple days I export the 2 reports I need from their UI and save them to a folder; it's automated from there and integrates with my clients' website - thats good enough - even if its not real time its a small price to pay for not having to navigate (and maintain) Google's API madness. Like you said 8 different dashboards before you get what you need (and frontier LLMs cant help here), and even then you are forced to build some elaborate Oauth app instead of just getting a simple API key that you can paste in a .env file
- fsndz 2mo ago
  expertise at navigating accidental complexity can easily be mistaken for engineering expertise.
n8m8 2mo ago
I haven’t tried in about a year, but I could never do any meaningful work outside 1P Google apps (antigravity) due to such fast throttling.
1bm 2mo ago
You need to create a Google Cloud project to create an api key and when you try to create one you very often get error messages like: “Failed to create project, The request is suspicious. Please try again” or “ You do not have permission to create a key in this project”. You can then navigate multiple screens in GCP to make it work but it’s a hassle compared to any other provider (OAI/Ant/OpenRouter or any of the Chinese labs).
- qlte 2mo ago
  I didn't have that issue back when I originally created my API keys a couple years ago. Just out of curiosity I switched to a different Google account that had never interacted with AI Studio and never used Google Cloud console. It was literally two clicks, and didn't even leave the page: the dialog asked to create a project and type in a name, I did that, clicked submit and then it was selected as the default project. One more click and I had the free tier API key. Not saying you didn't have that experience at the time, but personally I have had zero issues with AI Studio and consider it the most dead simple/fastest dev dashboard to get started compared to the others like OpenAI/Anthropic (thanks to Google's free tier that lets you skip billing setup annoyances just to play around with Gemini). Despite what HN threads (that are also frequently confused and talking about GCP instead) portray as universal/widespread issues or the process being complex and time consuming somehow.
  - ac29 2mo ago
    Last time I used the AI studio free tier it was limited to one or two requests, effectively useless. I think people are complaining its too hard to set up a paid API key (no reason you should make paying customers spend more than a few clicks and a minute of their time to pay you)
Saline9515 2mo ago
On top of being the hardest website to navigate, Google console a) doesn't have real time billing (!) b) doesn't allow you to set a budget limit. Sorry but it's not worth waking up with a 100k$ bill, fix your platform first.
- qlte 2mo ago
  You prepay for tokens exactly like the OpenAI/Anthropic dev dashboards when using AI Studio, which the link above is pointing to not GCP, also there are project specific spend caps now. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#spend-caps https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#spend-caps
  - Saline9515 2mo ago
    You are right; last time I tried it I used the cloud console as I needed gemini with the places tool included. However: "Experimental: The feature is experimental and limited in scope. You are subject to overages for around a 10 minute latency period." Why in 2026 can't Google do a database lookup in real time? This is so ridiculous.
- alasdair_ 2mo ago
  Oh it’s worse than that. There are places where you CAN set a limit. This seems great until you are at the center of a huge traffic spike because of good pr and so you try to change it to a larger number only to be told you need to wait 24 hours for the setting to change. Biggest traffic day of the decade and our site was down because of google.
- krat0sprakhar 2mo ago
  Spend caps can now be set https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/more-control-over-gemini-api-costs/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...
strobe 2mo ago
it worked for me okay when I needed it for myself in my personal account. But when I tried setup this for a company I spent almost a day solving lot of small puzzles in GCE like how to tell CEO that he have to connect billing account created for other purposes (and he not even remember at time that it exist) to new project and all other things that others talking about.
jgoodhcg 2mo ago
That is easy but I’ve also found myself in account setup dashboards that were obviously geared toward enterprise trying to set up access to tinker with something AI related. It might have been TTS but it’s been a little while and I can’t quite remember.
ur-whale 2mo ago
> Can you help me understand how it is hard to get an API key from Google? Using Google products in general is an effing nightmare as soon as you have to give them money. The one thing you want in a business is to remove friction when people want to give you money, a concept Google has never been able to understand.
- knollimar 2mo ago
  Google if you're reading this, it does not mean I do not want limits on spending
- ac29 2mo ago
  > Using Google products in general is an effing nightmare as soon as you have to give them money Spending money via Google Pay on Android is extremely easy, Google does know how to accept customer's money (in the consumer space)
sireat 2mo ago
Maybe things have changed but it was a big mess trying to getting an API key from Google as an individual a few years ago. Way too much conflicting documentation. Eventually I gave up and run a few hundred million tokens (edit a few billion) through openrouter.ai using Gemini Flash 1.5 to Flash 2.5 Every since price increases on Flash 3.0 I've stopped using Gemini, too expensive for basic classification, sentiment detection, ocr etc. As other posters said Google assumes you are some bigcorp trying to use their products. The Vertex versus AI studio confusion did not help.
uname0891 2mo ago
We have probably 10+ years old account with Google cloud etc. We recently had a production deployment, I went over to AI studio to get new keys and it kept failing saying "Failed to generate API key, The request is suspicious. Please try again" - It was through my standard browser, same geo-ip. And it just worked after 2 days.
fiej 2mo ago
I tried to use Gemini for one of my projects a month ago. Immediately after signing up and paying for credits, I got an email saying, “Action required: your billing account {redacted} is past due or has invalid payment information.” I have no idea why it says this. My credit card on file works. My balance updated with a new amount from that card. 11 days later, my account was terminated. I still don’t understand what went wrong or how to fix it. I do pay for OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs keys.
- krat0sprakhar 2mo ago
  Have you tried using the free tier in https://aistudio.google.com/api-keys https://aistudio.google.com/api-keys? Sorry for your billing issues - these can be super annoying to resolve
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
surfmike 2mo ago
Personally I went to https://console.cloud.google.com https://console.cloud.google.com since I already had some GCP projects. Then I searched for Gemini API Key. It brought me to https://console.cloud.google.com/agent-platform/studio/settings/api-keys https://console.cloud.google.com/agent-platform/studio/setti.... Then, there was a banner saying "Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities." Then, I did that, which took quite a while (minutes). Finally, I was able to see the way to create an API key. The fact that there's two ways to get keys is also very confusing.
- vlovich123 2mo ago
  > Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities Isn’t this the insecure thing that gives all your Google API keys access to Gemini, even those that were intended to be semi public (eg maps API keys embedded in websites or apps)
- krat0sprakhar 2mo ago
  +1 GCP can be confusing - I totally get that. Even if you have GCP projects, I'd still recommend the AI studio UI - easier to figure out. Also, you can easily see the free tier in AI studio and just use your API key from there.
  - surfmike 2mo ago
    Yes I will look into it now but there’s no cross reference from GCP, and why are there two ways? And why did the GCP way require all these APIs enabled while AI studio didn’t?
    - ethbr1 2mo ago
      > And why did the GCP way require all these APIs enabled while AI studio didn’t? Because whatever internal team owns AI Studio fought for approvals to do so and GCP didn't?
  - miohtama 2mo ago
    Luckily, an AI solves this. But ironically my experience is that Codex/Claude navigate GCP better than Gemini.
bobkb 2mo ago
Same experience. It took minutes to find the API key from the console. Now following up with Google support team without luck to find the logs. Prompts send to the model and the responses including the thinking was available in the ai studio. But it’s unclear where to find the same in console. To make matters worse there is vertex api and rebranded to Gemini something and making it very confusing.
desmosxxx 2mo ago
I just asked Gemini how to do it and that's exactly what it sent me. Was up and running in a few minutes.
throwaway894345 2mo ago
I even know the link existed but forgot what it was specifically and couldn’t remember what AI* property it was offered under and it took me a long time to figure it out.
philtar 2mo ago
[dead]
japborst 2mo ago
The problem is that this doesn’t work for enterprise. The rate limits of that is super low. Then you need to migrate to Vertex and that is just a pain. Who ever thought of using JSON instead of an api key…
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
the_bigfatpanda 2mo ago
As someone who has been running Gemini models in production for a year, recently (last 2 months), I have been actively moving away from it. The primary reason for me has been that Google autonomously decides to downgrade usage tiers and then upgrade them again - and does this incorrectly. Over the last week itself, in the span of two days, our account for first downgraded and then upgraded. This is despite matching the criteria to remain at the tier we operate at throughout. Google Support (when you finally get to a human) has accepted that these are potentially bugs, but the first time it happened, we were rate limited so severely for ~4 hours that I find it really difficult to continue trusting Google.
nxdmum 2mo ago
Simple question - can i use Gemini 3.7 flash with a subscription in my own harness and not in agy client ? You're from Google so the question. By the way - I love Gemini's personality . it's phenomenal to work with The reason i want my own harness - is the custom tools that i provide vs the low tier tools that come with the custom harnesses. You'll would really benefit , if we could use Gemini in our own harness and not be forced to use it via agy . i've tried using gemini to circumvent - but not been successful. If you see this - please reply here
pantsforbirds 2mo ago
I have a Google account that I had tied to a domain I originally purchased from google (when they had the .dev offerings), and now that it's been purchased by square space my ability to use AI through that account is in a bizarre state. Even my free gmail account has more AI offerings, and I'm not allowed to pay for improved AI offerings on my custom domain & google workspace account. I know this is probably a pretty small edge case, but it is a bit frustrating. Any other provider lets you sign up with an email and give them a payment processor/card, but because google wants me to only use their unified workspace for signing up, I'm completely locked out now.
cheercheung 2mo ago
i use gemini api in the third-party platform like openrouter and evolink.ai , easier to get key and manage my bill

dogomatic 2mo ago

GCP/vertex is a maze

jjcm 2mo ago

Disclaimer that I haven't tried this since January, so things may have changed in the last 7mo, but this was my experience at that time: https://x.com/pwnies/status/2010523020629274723 https://x.com/pwnies/status/2010523020629274723 At a high level though, as a rule of thumb Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first, and at a human scale second. For other companies it's the opposite. Generally what that means is the first experience you get with a Google product will route you through 8 different dashboards to set up ACLs before you've hired your 2nd employee.

qlte 2mo ago
FWIW I definitely did not not need to do anything like that to generate a key via AI Studio. It was like three clicks to get the free tier key, later on enabling billing was a few more plus typing in credit card info.
- theplumber 2mo ago
  It was 3 clicks because you knew where to look for.
  - abirch 2mo ago
    A pet peeve of mine is that Google doesn't let you search all the options like Apple or Microsoft E.g., I have flashbacks to trying to turn off or on bells in Google Home. A simple search bar would help people trying find API keys, etc.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  yeah, "enabling billing" is a whole other ordeal. Like it all makes sense, it's not that hard, it's just a lot of extra clicks where the competition doesn't require that. You can blow off this feedback as the user whining, but it's real friction and the competition doesn't have that, so users are going to go elsewhere if they can.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 2mo ago
    I signed up for AWS (SES) recently for the first time and find their whole thing confusing as heck too. Signed into the wrong region and they pretend they don't even know who I am.
SyneRyder 2mo ago
Similar experience here, for what it's worth, though I didn't get as far as you. I basically just stopped and didn't bother - it was easier to go through OpenRouter than spend more energy on it. Also: > Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first So much this. I'm currently grandfathered in until the end of the year on Google's Search API, but the $35,000 they want to continue usage of my < 1000 personal searches per month, not going to happen. It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google.
- mahkeiro 2mo ago
  The current move to force the usage of their AI api from postpay to prepay is also another example. (At least it’s going to give me the last incentive to move to cheaper api)
- jpadkins 2mo ago
  It's not an assumption that the customer is Google scale that led the $35k monthly price point. It was that you (and many others like you) are breaking the terms of service (which state you are not supposed to store, process or analyze the search results). It was an API built for a different era, that doesn't really exist anymore. > It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google. That's great to hear! FWIW I agree with you that it's harder for independent professionals to get started on Google dev services than others, but the Search API is not developer service and was never intended to be.
  - SyneRyder 2mo ago
    Huh. I'm not storing the Google search results, and my local supplementary index is built from my own crawling, not from URLs from Google searches. But if re-ranking is regarded as processing & analyzing, then I'll remove the Google API calls now (and... done). Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia and EU Search Perspective have certainly been much friendlier to deal with.
solfox 2mo ago
> they're serving companies at Google scale first I think that's actually a very interesting insight that would be helpful for PMs on GCloud to take note of. As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco, forcing (I assume most) of their users into a arduous process of removing components they don't need. Google AI Studio is one of Google's solutions to this problem, but in typical Google fashion, it's bolted-on without any clear connection in the ecosystem. If you're also using GCloud, it's hard to remember it's even there. OpenAI's platform, by contrast, is streamlined, easy to use. With Google, I feel like I need to wade through the documentation first before even using the darn thing.
- echelon 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - deaux 2mo ago
    Sergey's out spending $100 million to lobby against the billionaire tax in California. Lest his net worth shrink from roughly $250 billion to $237 billion. Can't become a pleb now! [0] [0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-has-now-spent-100-million-to-fight-the-billionaire-tax/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/google-co-founder-sergey-b...
    - ikiris 2mo ago
      not that I'm intending to defend Sergey here but, if you could spend 0.04% of your net worth to protect 5% of your net worth (and probably all of your easy liquidity)... wouldn't you?
      - ryan_lane 2mo ago
        If my net worth were that high? No. Folks need to remember that we're closer to being homeless than we are to being as rich as them. You don't need to defend billionaires.
fragmede 2mo ago
Don't forget your account getting flagged for review, so you get to wait an extra 24 hours for no reason.
- claytongulick 2mo ago
  This happened to me once when I was setting up some virtual servers for a startup. I wanted a typical dev/qa/prod with medium specced boxes. I was denied for quota, with an esoteric process for review. I'd just made a case for deploying to GCP over AWD so got a bit of egg on my face. Went over and had it done on AWS in a few minutes. A couple days later, the Google product team contacted me. I told them what happened. It got escalated, and I ended up on a call with like 5 or 6 people from Google, some very senior. I told them what happened. They made very concerned sounding noises and told me how this was a product failure on their part, how they'd get it corrected, etc... and they'd fixed my account so I could now make the machines. Of course, I was already deployed to AWS at that point. That company grew and ended up with a pretty big cloud spend eventually. Google totally missed it. I was at a new startup a few years later and decided to deploy to GCP. Denied for quota.
nimchimpsky 2mo ago
[dead]
drschwabe 2mo ago
Literally just built a custom Adsense dashboard based on not integrating with Google's APIs. Every couple days I export the 2 reports I need from their UI and save them to a folder; it's automated from there and integrates with my clients' website - thats good enough - even if its not real time its a small price to pay for not having to navigate (and maintain) Google's API madness. Like you said 8 different dashboards before you get what you need (and frontier LLMs cant help here), and even then you are forced to build some elaborate Oauth app instead of just getting a simple API key that you can paste in a .env file
fsndz 2mo ago
expertise at navigating accidental complexity can easily be mistaken for engineering expertise.

n8m8 2mo ago

I haven’t tried in about a year, but I could never do any meaningful work outside 1P Google apps (antigravity) due to such fast throttling.

1bm 2mo ago

You need to create a Google Cloud project to create an api key and when you try to create one you very often get error messages like: “Failed to create project, The request is suspicious. Please try again” or “ You do not have permission to create a key in this project”. You can then navigate multiple screens in GCP to make it work but it’s a hassle compared to any other provider (OAI/Ant/OpenRouter or any of the Chinese labs).

qlte 2mo ago
I didn't have that issue back when I originally created my API keys a couple years ago. Just out of curiosity I switched to a different Google account that had never interacted with AI Studio and never used Google Cloud console. It was literally two clicks, and didn't even leave the page: the dialog asked to create a project and type in a name, I did that, clicked submit and then it was selected as the default project. One more click and I had the free tier API key. Not saying you didn't have that experience at the time, but personally I have had zero issues with AI Studio and consider it the most dead simple/fastest dev dashboard to get started compared to the others like OpenAI/Anthropic (thanks to Google's free tier that lets you skip billing setup annoyances just to play around with Gemini). Despite what HN threads (that are also frequently confused and talking about GCP instead) portray as universal/widespread issues or the process being complex and time consuming somehow.
- ac29 2mo ago
  Last time I used the AI studio free tier it was limited to one or two requests, effectively useless. I think people are complaining its too hard to set up a paid API key (no reason you should make paying customers spend more than a few clicks and a minute of their time to pay you)

Saline9515 2mo ago

On top of being the hardest website to navigate, Google console a) doesn't have real time billing (!) b) doesn't allow you to set a budget limit. Sorry but it's not worth waking up with a 100k$ bill, fix your platform first.

qlte 2mo ago
You prepay for tokens exactly like the OpenAI/Anthropic dev dashboards when using AI Studio, which the link above is pointing to not GCP, also there are project specific spend caps now. https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#spend-caps https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#spend-caps
- Saline9515 2mo ago
  You are right; last time I tried it I used the cloud console as I needed gemini with the places tool included. However: "Experimental: The feature is experimental and limited in scope. You are subject to overages for around a 10 minute latency period." Why in 2026 can't Google do a database lookup in real time? This is so ridiculous.
alasdair_ 2mo ago
Oh it’s worse than that. There are places where you CAN set a limit. This seems great until you are at the center of a huge traffic spike because of good pr and so you try to change it to a larger number only to be told you need to wait 24 hours for the setting to change. Biggest traffic day of the decade and our site was down because of google.
krat0sprakhar 2mo ago
Spend caps can now be set https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/more-control-over-gemini-api-costs/ https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...

strobe 2mo ago

it worked for me okay when I needed it for myself in my personal account. But when I tried setup this for a company I spent almost a day solving lot of small puzzles in GCE like how to tell CEO that he have to connect billing account created for other purposes (and he not even remember at time that it exist) to new project and all other things that others talking about.

jgoodhcg 2mo ago

That is easy but I’ve also found myself in account setup dashboards that were obviously geared toward enterprise trying to set up access to tinker with something AI related. It might have been TTS but it’s been a little while and I can’t quite remember.

ur-whale 2mo ago

> Can you help me understand how it is hard to get an API key from Google? Using Google products in general is an effing nightmare as soon as you have to give them money. The one thing you want in a business is to remove friction when people want to give you money, a concept Google has never been able to understand.

knollimar 2mo ago
Google if you're reading this, it does not mean I do not want limits on spending
ac29 2mo ago
> Using Google products in general is an effing nightmare as soon as you have to give them money Spending money via Google Pay on Android is extremely easy, Google does know how to accept customer's money (in the consumer space)

sireat 2mo ago

Maybe things have changed but it was a big mess trying to getting an API key from Google as an individual a few years ago. Way too much conflicting documentation. Eventually I gave up and run a few hundred million tokens (edit a few billion) through openrouter.ai using Gemini Flash 1.5 to Flash 2.5 Every since price increases on Flash 3.0 I've stopped using Gemini, too expensive for basic classification, sentiment detection, ocr etc. As other posters said Google assumes you are some bigcorp trying to use their products. The Vertex versus AI studio confusion did not help.

uname0891 2mo ago

We have probably 10+ years old account with Google cloud etc. We recently had a production deployment, I went over to AI studio to get new keys and it kept failing saying "Failed to generate API key, The request is suspicious. Please try again" - It was through my standard browser, same geo-ip. And it just worked after 2 days.

fiej 2mo ago

I tried to use Gemini for one of my projects a month ago. Immediately after signing up and paying for credits, I got an email saying, “Action required: your billing account {redacted} is past due or has invalid payment information.” I have no idea why it says this. My credit card on file works. My balance updated with a new amount from that card. 11 days later, my account was terminated. I still don’t understand what went wrong or how to fix it. I do pay for OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs keys.

krat0sprakhar 2mo ago
Have you tried using the free tier in https://aistudio.google.com/api-keys https://aistudio.google.com/api-keys? Sorry for your billing issues - these can be super annoying to resolve
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surfmike 2mo ago

Personally I went to https://console.cloud.google.com https://console.cloud.google.com since I already had some GCP projects. Then I searched for Gemini API Key. It brought me to https://console.cloud.google.com/agent-platform/studio/settings/api-keys https://console.cloud.google.com/agent-platform/studio/setti.... Then, there was a banner saying "Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities." Then, I did that, which took quite a while (minutes). Finally, I was able to see the way to create an API key. The fact that there's two ways to get keys is also very confusing.

vlovich123 2mo ago
> Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities Isn’t this the insecure thing that gives all your Google API keys access to Gemini, even those that were intended to be semi public (eg maps API keys embedded in websites or apps)
krat0sprakhar 2mo ago
+1 GCP can be confusing - I totally get that. Even if you have GCP projects, I'd still recommend the AI studio UI - easier to figure out. Also, you can easily see the free tier in AI studio and just use your API key from there.
- surfmike 2mo ago
  Yes I will look into it now but there’s no cross reference from GCP, and why are there two ways? And why did the GCP way require all these APIs enabled while AI studio didn’t?
  - ethbr1 2mo ago
    > And why did the GCP way require all these APIs enabled while AI studio didn’t? Because whatever internal team owns AI Studio fought for approvals to do so and GCP didn't?
- miohtama 2mo ago
  Luckily, an AI solves this. But ironically my experience is that Codex/Claude navigate GCP better than Gemini.

bobkb 2mo ago

Same experience. It took minutes to find the API key from the console. Now following up with Google support team without luck to find the logs. Prompts send to the model and the responses including the thinking was available in the ai studio. But it’s unclear where to find the same in console. To make matters worse there is vertex api and rebranded to Gemini something and making it very confusing.

desmosxxx 2mo ago

I just asked Gemini how to do it and that's exactly what it sent me. Was up and running in a few minutes.

throwaway894345 2mo ago

I even know the link existed but forgot what it was specifically and couldn’t remember what AI* property it was offered under and it took me a long time to figure it out.

philtar 2mo ago

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japborst 2mo ago

The problem is that this doesn’t work for enterprise. The rate limits of that is super low. Then you need to migrate to Vertex and that is just a pain. Who ever thought of using JSON instead of an api key…

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the_bigfatpanda 2mo ago

As someone who has been running Gemini models in production for a year, recently (last 2 months), I have been actively moving away from it. The primary reason for me has been that Google autonomously decides to downgrade usage tiers and then upgrade them again - and does this incorrectly. Over the last week itself, in the span of two days, our account for first downgraded and then upgraded. This is despite matching the criteria to remain at the tier we operate at throughout. Google Support (when you finally get to a human) has accepted that these are potentially bugs, but the first time it happened, we were rate limited so severely for ~4 hours that I find it really difficult to continue trusting Google.

nxdmum 2mo ago

Simple question - can i use Gemini 3.7 flash with a subscription in my own harness and not in agy client ? You're from Google so the question. By the way - I love Gemini's personality . it's phenomenal to work with The reason i want my own harness - is the custom tools that i provide vs the low tier tools that come with the custom harnesses. You'll would really benefit , if we could use Gemini in our own harness and not be forced to use it via agy . i've tried using gemini to circumvent - but not been successful. If you see this - please reply here

pantsforbirds 2mo ago

I have a Google account that I had tied to a domain I originally purchased from google (when they had the .dev offerings), and now that it's been purchased by square space my ability to use AI through that account is in a bizarre state. Even my free gmail account has more AI offerings, and I'm not allowed to pay for improved AI offerings on my custom domain & google workspace account. I know this is probably a pretty small edge case, but it is a bit frustrating. Any other provider lets you sign up with an email and give them a payment processor/card, but because google wants me to only use their unified workspace for signing up, I'm completely locked out now.

cheercheung 2mo ago

i use gemini api in the third-party platform like openrouter and evolink.ai , easier to get key and manage my bill