_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
(HTM) Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
happyopossum wrote 7 min 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: [1] 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.
(HTM) [1]: https://one.google.com/intl/en/about/google-ai-plans/
nkotov wrote 2 hours 0 min ago:
I had a similar experience with GCP / Google Workspace. It's just bad
experience.
Arubis wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
Similarly to DeepSeek, thisâmore than dealing with different APIs and
routingâis the problem OpenRouter actually solves for me.
drob518 wrote 2 hours 31 min 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.
tgtweak wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
Have you looked at getting a gpt api key for gpt5? you have to do
selfie-ID verification...
twsted wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
Same for me. Tried just a few days ago and, frustrated, gave up.
homakov wrote 3 hours 57 min 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
h33t-l4x0r wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
Did you ask Gemini how to do it? ducks rotten tomatoes-
gilrain wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
Yes, thatâs part of the article you didnât read.
rodolphoarruda wrote 4 hours 25 min 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 wrote 2 hours 27 min 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 wrote 2 hours 9 min 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!
therealmarv wrote 4 hours 59 min 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?
francoispiquard wrote 5 hours 30 min 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.
lysecret wrote 5 hours 50 min 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.
temp1611 wrote 6 hours 18 min 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 wrote 5 hours 54 min 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.
erdemo wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
I am glad to see someone write about this, google API dashboards are
... crap.
bambax wrote 6 hours 25 min 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 wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
Leadership roles, especially in large corporations, often favor
people who are opportunistic. They donât 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).
Itâs a gamble, and sometimes it pays off.
By the time people accept that itâs hot garbage, the leaders have
already moved on to the next opportunity. And itâs 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.)
sylware wrote 6 hours 28 min 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[])... 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.
crocowhile wrote 6 hours 33 min 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.
windex wrote 7 hours 3 min 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.
phromo wrote 7 hours 15 min 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.
scirob wrote 7 hours 27 min 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
jwr wrote 7 hours 27 min 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.
odie5533 wrote 7 hours 52 min 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 wrote 6 hours 52 min 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)
GuestFAUniverse wrote 7 hours 54 min 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: [1] 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.
(HTM) [1]: https://rclone.org/drive/
wg0 wrote 8 hours 5 min 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.
dsmurrell wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
I avoid using Google because their cloud service product is so badly
designed.
runtimepanic wrote 8 hours 15 min 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.
arand wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
a hack you this went to a can go to you so good hahahahaha§hah§aha
dvorka wrote 8 hours 31 min 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.
srijanshukla18 wrote 8 hours 46 min 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.
journal wrote 8 hours 50 min 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.
aspenmayer324 wrote 9 hours 20 min 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!
magictux wrote 9 hours 37 min 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.
krisgenre wrote 9 hours 45 min 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.
Simplita wrote 9 hours 48 min ago:
I thought it was just me. The onboarding experience feels
unintentionally hostile for new developers.
asim wrote 9 hours 58 min 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 wrote 9 hours 47 min 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?
asim wrote 9 hours 14 min 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.
BozeWolf wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
And yet google generates around $1.9miljon revenue per employee per
year. Which is a lot, almost as good as competitors.
bobjordan wrote 10 hours 3 min ago:
I went through similar song and dance using a paid Gemini code assist
âstandardâ 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 Iâd 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 Iâm 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 âstandardâ 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, itâs pretty useless compared to
Claude code max plan. But there doesnât seem to be any similar plan
offering from Google.
rozap wrote 10 hours 17 min 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.
alexp2021 wrote 6 hours 25 min ago:
Exactly the same for me. Quote usage is something like 2%, but
constantly experience the quota limit error.
Filligree wrote 2 hours 26 min ago:
The trick here is that they describe internal loadshedding as quota
limits.
Thereâs a quote for your general class of query, and thereâs a
quota for how many can be in flight on a given server. Itâs not
necessarily about you specifically.
MrOrelliOReilly wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
I have been fighting the same bizarre quota demon. Scripts kept
timing out due to quota limitations, but I haven't been able to find
any indication of a limit in the console. Finally gave up and
switched to Claude, since they at least have a sane interface for API
keys and billing!
jacquesm wrote 8 hours 31 min 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.
kyrra wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
Chargebacks or disputes will lock your account, so definitely stay
away from that path.
But just closing the bank account will stop auto billing (it's
considered a decline). So if you closed the account, it would just
stop paying for whatever it is, and then cloud may lock the gcp
account until it's paid. (I'm not 100% sure what cloud does with
unpaid invoices).
gikkman wrote 7 hours 51 min 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.
rand17 wrote 10 hours 29 min 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 wrote 10 hours 21 min 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 wrote 10 hours 10 min 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 wrote 9 hours 53 min ago:
> Bad code (in work, in reality, not in a hobby project) is
rarely converted into good code
Most code everywhere is bad code. Nobody cares unfortunately.
> And the last one: in my twenty plus years of being a dev, this
is the first year job offers simply just dried up.
Actions of the US gov have caused a recession.
It's hard to find jobs in that environment
Put the blame where it's due.
AI is an excuse.
No company is going to hire now because of that.
There is also heavy bloat of incompetent software developers that
needs to be shed.
Edit: Side note of shedding incompetent people
At work, I have a budget for tools, in the past this was handed
over to contractors (think accenture).
They would come back with estimates of 1+ months, multiple
developers and a manager for something I could do in a week.
They would deliver very poor quality and I had no choice.
With LLMs I can do the same quality of work in 30 minutes, then
clean it up for a day and have a much better tool.
That budget is now used for other things and probably will be cut
due to economic uncertainty.
ianberdin wrote 10 hours 32 min ago:
I had even worse experience with Microsoft Azure. In the middle of the
path I realized a third-party sales âultra real Microsoft support,
certifiedâ is dealing with me in order to sell me overpriced options.
Aeolun wrote 10 hours 40 min ago:
This is exactly my experience with gemini, and exactly why I bounced on
the stupid thing. I just donât have hours to waste on Googleâs
stupid processes.
kkarpkkarp wrote 10 hours 23 min 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
DeathArrow wrote 10 hours 55 min 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.
lxe wrote 11 hours 32 min 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".
DANmode wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
Google doesnât have leadership, it has shareholders.
theflyinghorse wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
What are the chances that Google leadership even seen GCP interface
outside of a demo once a never?
jiggawatts wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
A purer, more perfect example of Conwayâs Law has never been made
more manifest than the myriad AWS consoles, each further partitioned
by region. [1] And see especially âThe Only Unbreakable Ruleâ by
Molly Rocket:
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
(HTM) [2]: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY
Aperocky wrote 11 hours 9 min 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 wrote 8 hours 27 min 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)
SamDc73 wrote 11 hours 46 min 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 â¦
guelo wrote 11 hours 47 min 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.
CSMastermind wrote 11 hours 55 min 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.
Ozzie_osman wrote 11 hours 58 min 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).
thecupisblue wrote 6 hours 7 min ago:
Oh man let me add onto that!
4. If you read about a new Gemini model, you might want to use it -
but are you using @google/genai, @google/generative-ai (wow finally
deprecated) or @google-ai/generativelanguage? Silly mistake, but when
nano banana dropped it was highly confusing image gen was available
only through one of these.
5. Gemini supports video! But that video first has to be uploaded to
"Google GenAI Drive" which will then splices it into 1 FPS images and
feeds it to the LLM. No option to improve the FPS, so if you want
anything properly done, you'll have to splice it yourself and upload
it to generativelanguage.googleapis.com which is only accessible
using their GenAI SDK. Don't ask which one, I'm still not sure.
6. Nice, it works. Let's try using live video. Open the docs, you get
it mentioned a bunch of times but 0 documentation on how to actually
do it. Only suggestions for using 3rd party services. When you
actually find it in the docs, it says
"To see an example of how to use the Live API in a streaming audio
and video format, run the "Live API - Get Started" file in the
cookbooks repository".
Oh well, time to read badly written python.
7. How about we try generating a video - open up AI studio, see only
Veo 2 available from the video models. But, open up "Build" section,
and I can have Gemini 3 build me a video generation tool that will
use Veo 3 via API by clicking on the example. But wait why cant we
use Veo 3 in the AI studio with the same API key?
8. Every Veo 3 extended video has absolutely garbled sound and there
is nothing you can do about it, or maybe there is, but by this point
I'm out of willpower to chase down edgy edge cases in their docs.
9. Let's just mention one semi-related thing - some things in the
Cloud come with default policies that are just absurdly limiting,
which means you have to create a resource/account, update policies
related to whatever you want to do, which then tells you these are
_old policies_ and you want to edit new ones, but those are
impossible to properly find.
10. Now that we've setup our accounts, our AI tooling, our
permissions, we write the code which takes less than all of the
previous actions in the list. Now, you want to test it on Android?
Well, you can:
- A. Test it with your account by signing in into emulators, be it
local or cloud, manually, which means passing 2FA every time if you
want to automate this and constantly risking your account
security/ban.
- B. Create a google account for testing which you will use, add it
to Licensed Testers on the play store, invite it to internal testers,
wait for 24-48 hours to be able to use it, then if you try to
automate testing, struggle with having to mock a whole Google Account
login process which every time uses some non-deterministic logic to
show a random pop-up. Then, do the same thing for the purchase
process, ending up with a giant script of clicking through the
options
11. Congratulations, you made it this far and are able to deploy your
app to Beta. Now, find 12 testers to actively use your app for free,
continuously for 14 days to prove its not a bad app.
At this point, Google is actively preventing you from shipping at
every step, causing more and more issues the deeper down the stack
you go.
egorfine wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
12. Release your first version.
13. Get your whole google account banned.
davidmurdoch wrote 2 hours 39 min ago:
14. Ask why it was banned and they respond with something like
"oh you know what you did".
te_chris wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
Trying to implement their gRPC api from their specs and protobufs for
Live is an exercise in immense frustration and futility. I wanted to
call it from Elixir, even with our strong AI I wasted days then gave
up.
prodigycorp wrote 8 hours 19 min ago:
Also, usage and billing takes a DAY to update. On top of that, there
are no billing caps or credit-based billing. They put the entire
burden on users not to ensure that they don't have a mega bill.
paganel wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
> there are no billing caps or credit-based billing.
Was really curious about that when I saw this in the posted
article:
> I had some spare cash to burn on this experiment,
Hopefully the article's author is fully aware of the real risk of
giving Alphabet his CC details on a project which has no billing
caps.
nacozarina wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
there's prob a couple ppl out there with an Amex Black parked on
a cloud acct, lol
CSMastermind wrote 11 hours 53 min 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.
akhilnchauhan wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
> The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the
Gemini UI.
This difference between API vs UI responses being different is
common across all the big players (Claude, GPT models, etc.)
The consumer chat interfaces are designed for a different
experience than a direct API call, even if pinging the same model.
te_chris wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
The way the models behave in Vertex AI Studio vs the API is
unforgivable. Totally different.
halflings wrote 6 hours 45 min ago:
"The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the
Gemini UI."
This shouldn't be surprised, e.g. the model != the product.
The same way GPT4o behaves differently than the ChatGPT product
when using GPT4o.
hobofan wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
> The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry
logic is basically mandatory.
That is sadly true across the board for AI inference API providers.
OpenAI and Anthropic API stability usually suffers around launch
events. Azure OpenAI/Foundry serving regularly has 500 errors for
certain time periods.
For any production feature with high uptime guarantees I would
right now strongly advise for picking a model you can get from
multiple providers and having failover between clouds.
downsplat wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
Yeah at $WORK we use various LLM APIs to analyze text; it's not
heavy usage in terms of tokens but maybe 10K calls per day.
We've found that response times vary a lot, sometimes going over
a minute for simple tasks, and random fails happen. Retry logic
is definitely mandatory, and it's good to have multiple providers
ready. We're abstracting calls across three different APIs
(openai, gemini and mistral, btw we're getting pretty good
results with mistral!) so we can switch workloads quickly if
needed.
specproc wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
I have also had some super weird stuff in my output (2.5-flash).
I'm passing docs for bulk inference via Vertex, and a small number
of returned results will include gibberish in Japanese.
ashwindharne wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
I get this a lot too, have made most of the Gemini models
essentially unusable for agent-esque tasks. I tested with 2.5 pro
and it still sometimes devolved into random gibberish pretty
frequently.
walthamstow wrote 7 hours 55 min ago:
I had this last night from flash lite! My results were
interspersed with random snippets of legible, non-gibberish
English language. It was like my results had got jumbled with
somenone else's.
ianberdin wrote 10 hours 28 min ago:
Even funnier, when Pro 3 answers to a previous message in my chat.
Just making a duplicate answer with different words. Retry helps,
butâ¦
DANmode wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
So, not something for a production app yet.
doctorpangloss wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
Not being able to sign up for stuff is in the same league as being
perpetually low on disk space.
ankit219 wrote 12 hours 38 min 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).
kunley wrote 13 hours 43 min 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 wrote 12 hours 5 min ago:
I canât 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 ââ¦not
lurching around like a caveman.â
If youâre 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. Itâs not criticizing people who write code by hand as
such - the author is criticizing themselves for doing something the
hard way.
kunley wrote 6 hours 30 min 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
antonvs wrote 1 hour 59 min ago:
Isnât it just the Gemini key aspect thatâs hard? Thatâs not
specific to this way of coding, just to Googleâs half-baked
mish-mash of offerings.
He should have used OpenAI or Anthropic - instead of using
Google, like a Neanderthal.
gilrain wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
You came in hot with a wrong assumption couched in absolute
terms⦠and, after correction, youâre flouncing out with the
same irrelevent message.
Iâm an AI skeptic, but this ainât it.
vinhnx wrote 13 hours 47 min 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 wrote 13 hours 43 min 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.
KerrickStaley wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
In my personal experience, OpenRouter makes it easy to call Gemini 3
Pro Preview and other frontier LLMs with very little setup. Itâs
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.
arihant wrote 14 hours 7 min 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 doesnât 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.
KnuthIsGod wrote 14 hours 13 min ago:
How long before Gemini is killed by Google and gets
a nice grave at Killed By Google ? [1] I give it a single digit number
of years.
(HTM) [1]: https://killedbygoogle.com/
msp26 wrote 14 hours 25 min 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. [1] .
You guys closed this issue for no reason: [2] 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.
(HTM) [1]: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#sup...
(HTM) [2]: https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/issues/660
huevosabio wrote 14 hours 33 min ago:
This nonsense alone justifies the existence of OpenRouter.
squirrellous wrote 14 hours 39 min ago:
As a former employee, the engineering culture at Google gives me
old-school hacker vibes, so users are very much expected to âfigure
it outâ and thatâs somewhat accepted (and I say this with fond
memories). Itâs no surprise the company struggles with good UX.
gilrain wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
> users are very much expected to âfigure it outâ and thatâs
somewhat accepted
That sounds like a really fun place to work but a really awful
business to be a customer of.
levocardia wrote 14 hours 41 min 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?
drak0n1c wrote 7 hours 36 min ago:
I use a third party API aggregator/forwarder (VeniceAI) for this
reason.
andy99 wrote 14 hours 25 min 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 donât 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?
JohnMakin wrote 14 hours 39 min ago:
because the bubble in which googlers exist is inherently
user-hostile, even to their own detriment. been like this for a while
CGamesPlay wrote 13 hours 57 min 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 wrote 12 hours 53 min 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.
eezing wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
It looks AI wonât replace software engineers after all.
binarymax wrote 15 hours 18 min 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.
senthilnayagam wrote 15 hours 54 min 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
rvnx wrote 16 hours 5 min ago:
Setting up a limit of spending is even more difficult
movedx01 wrote 2 hours 20 min 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.
g-unit33 wrote 16 hours 11 min ago:
Wait until the 429 error message
wosat wrote 10 hours 58 min 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.
btown wrote 16 hours 22 min ago:
In case it's helpful to anyone, [1] 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.
(HTM) [1]: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview
numlocked wrote 2 hours 13 min 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.
intothemild wrote 16 hours 33 min 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 wrote 16 hours 30 min ago:
That's fine but you're missing out, and you're most likely paying
waay more than you need to.
ipaddr wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
Missing out on nothing
koinedad wrote 17 hours 7 min 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 wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
I work with GCP regularly. Once youâre familiar with their
approach, itâs straightforward enough. But the situation with
Gemini is on a whole different level.
jpollock wrote 17 hours 9 min 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.
(HTM) [1]: https://support.stripe.com/questions/background-on-indian-gove...
heystefan wrote 17 hours 12 min 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.
happyopossum wrote 17 hours 39 min ago:
The underlying issue here is that 3.0 is still in preview. Once itâs
a GA model, you can just use your $20 consumer Ai pro sub and skip all
the GCP stuffâ¦
ryuuseijin wrote 17 hours 41 min 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).
robertheadley wrote 17 hours 45 min 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.
andy99 wrote 17 hours 45 min 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 donât want to tie
anything to my google account, especially any form of payment (no idea
if I actually need to do this). Second I donât want AI studio or
whatever, I just want a similar api to the others I can hit.
I admit Iâm completely ignorant about whatâs really involved, I
have never tried and am just going on vague things Iâve 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 wrote 17 hours 33 min ago:
I feel you on not wanting to tie anything additional to your Google
account. Will I somehow do something ânaughtyâ (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.
postsantum wrote 17 hours 48 min 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 wrote 16 hours 57 min 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
obmelvin wrote 17 hours 49 min 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: [1]
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)
(HTM) [1]: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key
jiggawatts wrote 15 hours 16 min ago:
Every aspect is at least partially broken several times a day, and
even when there isn't a temporary outage of something somewhere,
there are nonsensical "blocks" for things that ought to just work.
I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I
can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI
won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to
use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse,
just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am
paying for and can use elsewhere.
Simultaneously, I'm trying to convince my company to pay for a
corporate account of some sort so that I can use API keys with custom
tools and run up a bill of potentially thousands of dollars that we
can charge back to the customer.
My manager tried to follow the instructions and... followed the wrong
ones. They all look the same. They all talk about "Gemini" and
"Enterprise". He ended up signing up for Google's equivalent of
Copilot for business use, not something that provides API keys to
developers. Bzzt... start over from the beginning!
I did eventually find the instructions by (ironically) asking Gemini
Pro, which provided the convenient 27 step process for signing up to
three different services in a chain before you can do anything. Oh,
and if any of them trigger any kind of heuristic, again, you get a
hand in face telling you firmly and not-so-politely to take a hike.
PS: Azure's whatever-it-is-called-today is just as bad if not worse.
We have a corporate account and can't access GPT 5 because... I
dunno. We just can't. Not worthy enough for access to Sam Altman's
baby, apparently.
BoorishBears wrote 16 hours 35 min ago:
As the other comments pointed out, that's not covering billing...
But also the (theoretical) production platform for Gemini is Vertex
AI, not AI Studio.
And until pretty recently using that took figuring out service
accounts, and none of Google's docs would demonstrate production
usage.
Instead they'd use the gcloud CLI to authenticate, and you'd have to
figure out how each SDK consumed a credentials file.
-
Now there's "express mode" for Vertex which uses an API Key, so
things are better, but the complaints were well earned.
At one point there were even features (like using a model you
finetuned) that didn't work without gcloud depending on if you used
Vertex or AI Studio:
(HTM) [1]: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/how-can-i-use-fine-tuned-mod...
yawnxyz wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
I've to this day never been able to pay for Gemini through the API,
even though I've tried maybe 6-7 times
If you bring it up to Logan he'll just brush it off â I honestly
don't know if they test these UX flows with their own personal
accounts, or if something is buggy with my account.
altbdoor wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
To Logan's credit though, his team made and drove a lot of good
improvements in AI studio and Gemini in general since the early
days.
I feel his team is really hitting a wall now in terms of
improvements, because it involves Google teams/products outside of
their control, or require deep collaboration.
bobviolier wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
(HTM) [1]: https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1978897746921693572?s=...
TheTaytay wrote 11 hours 42 min ago:
Yes, I get the impression he has been fighting this fight
internally since the day he arrived. He canât exactly talk
about how infuriating it must be, but I look forward to his
memoir.
pants2 wrote 16 hours 37 min ago:
This is my experience as well in my personal account, however at
work given we were already paying for Google Cloud it was easy
enough to connect a GCP account.
But somehow personally even though I'm a paying Google One
subscriber and have a GCP billing account with a credit card, I get
confusing errors when trying to use the Gemini API
leopoldj wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
As the article states, generating the key itself is easy. But getting
credit and billing are the issues.
kro wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
Agree, Google made it really easy here, compared to using service
account certificates like with some of their other APIs.
knollimar wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
I have it running and calling but it's not showing the usage and I
set it up the day gemini 3 came out
politelemon wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
I did this same thing and this was my first result too. I am just not
seeing how the author ended up where they did, unless knowing how to
use Google search is not a core skill.
mediaman wrote 15 hours 59 min ago:
Read the full post. Partway down you will see they agree with you
that getting an API key is not hard.
Paying is hard. And it is confusing how to set it up: you have to
create a Vertex billing account and go through a cumbersome process
to then connect your AIStudio to it and bring over a "project"
which then disconnects all the time and which you have to re-select
to use Nano Banana Pro or Gemini 3. It's a very bad process.
It's easy to miss this because they are very generous with the free
tier, but Gemini 3 is not free.
malfist wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
I did notice in their post instead of searching for answers, they
asked Gemini how to do things, and when that didn't work, they
asked Claude.
I often see coworkers offload their work of critical thinking to an
AI to give them answers instead doing the grunt work nessecary to
find their answers on their own.
dugidugout wrote 17 hours 7 min ago:
This rhetoric worries me. If you insist on degrading others at
least fix it to something like:
> [They seemingly] can't think on their own without an AI
[moderating]
They _literally_ can think on their own, and they _literally_ did
think up a handful of prompts.
A more constructive way to make what I assume to be your point
would be highlighting why this shift is meaningful and leaving
the appeal to ego for yourself.
ipaddr wrote 15 hours 9 min ago:
There is some truth in that statement.
Low energy afternoons you might be able to come up with a
prompt but not the actual solution.
There are people offloading all thoughts into prompts instead
of doing the research themselves and some have reached a point
where they lost the ability to do something because of over AI
use.
malfist wrote 16 hours 51 min ago:
I agree with your assessment, I am in the wrong here. It's easy
to be extra judgmental to anonymous figures on a blog you'll
never meet. Thank you for reminding me to give people the
benefit of doubt and not jump to worst case assumptions.
I've edited my post to be more charitable
verdverm wrote 17 hours 43 min 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)
arthurfirst wrote 2 hours 49 min ago:
I have a claude max subscription and a gemini pro sub and I
exclusively use them on the cli. When I run out of claude max each
week I switch over to gemini and the results have been pretty
impressive -- I did not want to like it but credit where credit is
due to google.
Like the OP others I didn't use the API for gemini and it was not
obvious how to do that -- that said it's not cost effective to
develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why
you would? Sure you need API for any applications with built-in LLM
features, but not for developing in the LLM assisted CLI tools.
I think the issue with cli tools for many is you need to be
competent with cli like a an actual nix user not Mac first user
etc. Personally I have over 30 years of daily shell use and a
sysadmin and developer. I started with korn and csh and then every
one you can think of since.
For me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible.
To say nothing of the physical aliments associated with excessive
mousing.
Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding
tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close
and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights
me the whole time.
amluto wrote 17 hours 21 min ago:
> Gemini via studio
Excuse me? If you mean AI Studio, are you talking about the
product where you canât even switch which logged in account
youâre using without agreeing to its terms under whatever random
account it selected, where the ability to turn off training on your
data does not obviously exist, and where itâs extremely unclear
how an organization is supposed to pay for it?
verdverm wrote 13 hours 30 min ago:
Don't get me wrong, aistudio is pretty bad and full of issues,
but getting an apikey was not hard or an issue itself. Using any
auth method besides personal account oauth with gemini-cli never
worked for me after hours of trying
rezonant wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
Yes, much like admin.google.com (the GSuite admin interface),
which goes ahead and tries to two-factor your personal GMail
account every single time you load it instead of asking you which
of the actual GSuite accounts you're signed into you'd like to
use...
Marsymars wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
I long ago concluded that trying to mix multiple google (or MS)
accounts in the same browser profile is a path to madness.
verdverm wrote 14 min ago:
seriously, just use different chrome profiles, but part of
the issue is that they are so interwoven you pretty much have
to do this
amluto wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
I love how the two factor screen has no obvious way to tell it
that you want a different account.
Hint: you can often avoid some of this mess by adding the
authuser=user@domain to the URL.
Leynos wrote 17 hours 39 min ago:
They could always just use OpenCoder, Crush or Goose with
OpenRouter ( [1] )
(HTM) [1]: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview
verdverm wrote 13 hours 32 min 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
arielcostas wrote 17 hours 50 min 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.
plaidfuji wrote 17 hours 52 min ago:
> The âSet up billingâ link kicked me out of Google AI Studio and
into Google Cloud Console, and my heart sank. Every time Iâve logged
into Google Cloud Console or AWS, Iâve 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
niwtsol wrote 18 hours 0 min 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.
heymijo wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
The really fun part was after getting billing finally set up in the
cloud console trying to find what model name you actually have to use
to call it via the API.
Conflicting information? Sure! Gemini cloud help being useless?
Naturally.
Oh and donât forget that error message being returned when you try
to call the API is because you didnât give your project the proper
permissions in google cloud console. What permissions do you need?
¯\_(ã)_/¯
Google Cloud Console feels like being stuck in the seventh circle of
hell.
sofixa wrote 17 hours 54 min ago:
Baring them using specific marketing terms (so you have EC2 for what
are basically virtual machines), for which both the docs and the
portal itself provide helpful information, what do you mean? I find
GCP's console and whole set up to be slightly better, but both it and
AWS are fine.
Now Azure, or anything made by VMware, you just know they hate you.
niwtsol wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
I agree that Google's console is slightly better, but a few of my
gripes with AWS specifically:
1. input fields that lack basic validation so you do some action
and then get an error message that is cryptic when simple "if this
value selected in drop down, you can't do X". Another example of
this is needing to get quota increase for your AWS account for an
instance type, but nothing on the frontend tells you that, and you
have to go through 3 or 4 weirdly linked support ticket/pages to
figure out how to make a request for an instance.
2. As another commenter said, billing - so many pages and ways to
cut the data but somehow it still seems complicated to find "which
instance is attached to resource X that is costing me $Y per month"
3. Documentation not matching UI - so many PMs/TPMs over the years
making resources that you find a blog/post that is a walk through,
but then you find they redesigned or moved a button and that makes
it difficult to follow.
4. I worked at Amazon for a bit and the internal tools feel like
they were built in the early 2000s and I think I have PTSD from
that which I still ascribe bad feelings towards AWS as there are
similarities
I think as you use it, you start to understand the gotchas and the
flows you need to do to get something working. I also appreciate
there is a ton of stuff they are empowering users to do and the
scale is incomprehensible, but just frustrated the UX is so poor.
I just started using Azure for another project and my goodness, I
can't even login to that vs the microsoft ads account w/ the same
email because of some weird MS365 permissions issue - by far the
worst.
jiggawatts wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
I love how people think Azure is somehow worse than AWS when the
latter isn't even a single portal, it's many, each of which shows
just one product in one region. Oh, you needed a VM with a network
and some storage, including access to blobs somewhere else in the
world? Just open up a dozen tabs and join the randomly generated
gibberish resource identifiers yourself manually like a savage!
sofixa wrote 8 hours 22 min ago:
> I love how people think Azure is somehow worse than AWS when
the latter isn't even a single portal, it's many, each of which
shows just one product in one region
Yep, which means that even an entire AWS region being down has no
impact on anything else. Unlike Azure where a single DC in Texas
being out meant no auth for anyone, anywhere in the world.
And aren't Azure and O365 infamous for having a convoluted web or
multiple portals to such an extent that there are multiple
websites trying to help you navigate them with direct links?
And in any case, Azure is not a serious cloud provider and anyone
picking it is at best not paying attention, at worst negligent at
their job (yeah I know, Azure is the cloud your bosses' boss
picks after some golfing and a nice dinner). They have a
~quarterly critical, trivial to exploit, usually cross-tenant,
vulnerability. Often with Microsoft having no mitigation and
having the the faintest idea if it was exploited. And stalling
the security researchers for weeks if not months.
The security posture of Azure is so appalling it's clear nobody
at that org who has any power cares about security in the
slightest. And it has been obvious for a few years now. Search
Wiz's blog just for their collection of ~10 Azure CVEs. For the
latest horrific one, cf:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-55241
doganugurlu wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
Exactly. Just as the lord intended.
Although Azure just randomly fails, and then it turns out it
actually worked but the UI had failed. But then the next step
throws an obscure error message, but you get around that on a
different screen, so on so forthâ¦
polalavik wrote 17 hours 57 min 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.
TheTaytay wrote 11 hours 28 min ago:
Well said.
Iâm literally afraid of the cloud console dashboards from the big
providers. Thatâs especially true with the quagmire that is AWS.
Itâs 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. Thatâs not a brag. Thatâs 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 âcertifiedâ on their
platform.
herpdyderp wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
DigitalOcean is such a dream to use. I also really appreciate all
their guides for almost everything web server related.
sbrother wrote 13 hours 58 min 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.
consumer451 wrote 18 hours 0 min 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 wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
It will be politics, it's always politics. Large orgs works a lot
like the feudal system.
consumer451 wrote 12 hours 41 min 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.
sirfz wrote 18 hours 6 min ago:
I find GCP frustrating (coming from AWS) but luckily asking Gemini how
to do things makes it much easier.
gxs wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
This is a longstanding issue weâve 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 thereâs no one to help
neom wrote 18 hours 28 min 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.
(HTM) [1]: https://x.com/OfficialLoganK
mvkel wrote 14 hours 54 min 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 wrote 2 hours 10 min 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.
verdverm wrote 17 hours 50 min 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
rtaylorgarlock wrote 18 hours 40 min 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 wrote 17 hours 50 min 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.
modeless wrote 18 hours 41 min 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 wrote 11 hours 13 min 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. Itâs annoying but one common thing is that anti
fraud systems seem to require humans in the loop, so itâs 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.
axi0m wrote 18 hours 42 min 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.
nl wrote 18 hours 46 min 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.
verdverm wrote 17 hours 48 min 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 wrote 15 hours 42 min 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 wrote 11 min 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
dannyobrien wrote 18 hours 49 min 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.
cortesoft wrote 18 hours 0 min ago:
I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and
sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I
want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people
or wait for things.
I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price
discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a
customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me
talk to someone before I can buy.
pmontra wrote 3 hours 56 min ago:
If it's only pay and go why have Sales at all? At the very best you
need only a slimmed down Sales Department, so being against pay and
go is self preservation.
hrimfaxi wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
For enterprise deals.
SecretDreams wrote 4 hours 26 min ago:
> use their sales skills
Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI
can replace.
biglyburrito wrote 4 hours 32 min ago:
My previous company was like this, and it boggles the mind.
Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely
discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's
best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it.
Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute
evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a
demo & a price quote.
My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service
onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product
(with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired)
without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the
year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the
company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I
heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had
been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go,
as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get
more traction in their market.
arjie wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
That's just a disqualification process. Many products don't want a
<$40k/annual customer because they're a net drain. For those, "talk
to sales" is a way to qualify whether you're worth it as a
customer. Very common in B2B and makes sense. Depends entirely on
the product, of course.
makeitdouble wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
> sales people
> talk to people
There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job
is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to
not do that.
As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will
have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc.
but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a
fundamental bit.
Hendrikto wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
> sales wanting direct contact with clients
But what do the clients want? Your business should not be
structured to make sales people happy.
Arainach wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
Instant self signup died with cryptocurrency and now AI: any "free"
source of compute/storage/resources will be immediately abused
until you put massive gates on account creation.
kijin wrote 11 hours 30 min ago:
Who said anything about free? OP wanted to pay Google $100.
Arainach wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
OP wanted "instant self signup". That doesn't work when
malicious actors are trying to register accounts with stolen
credentials. The verification flow is required because of the
amount of pressure from malicious actors against both free and
newly-created accounts.
"Give access now, cancel if validation fails" doesn't work
either - so long as attackers can extract more than 0 value in
that duration they'll flood you with bad accounts.
kijin wrote 11 min ago:
Well, then give me self-signup followed by a clearly outlined
verification flow that I can follow. If you show me a form
where I can upload my passport or enter a random number from
a charge on my card, that counts as "instant" enough. If you
really need to make me wait a couple of hours while somebody
manually reviews my info, fine, just tell me upfront so I can
do something else in the meantime. It's all about managing
expectations.
Besides, Amazon hands out reasonable quotas to newly created
accounts without much hassle, and they seem to be doing okay.
It's not about abuse.
satvikpendem wrote 12 hours 51 min ago:
You're not the target customer.
brightball wrote 15 hours 35 min ago:
It depends on the environment.
If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go,
it can work well.
If an application is complicated or itâs a tool that the whole
business runs on, often times the company will discover their
customers have more success with training and a point of
contact/account manager to help with onboarding.
Workaccount2 wrote 16 hours 19 min ago:
The number one rule of business that should just be passively
reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field:
1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.
the_snooze wrote 15 hours 33 min ago:
Parking apps donât seem to care much for that. They know
youâll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection
because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment
kiosks removed and replaced with âdownload our shitty app!â
notices.
dbspin wrote 2 hours 7 min ago:
At least in my country they face no competition. For a given
location, only one app will work.
Mashimo wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Huh, where I live you often can use many different parking
apps, and the one i tried is very simple and user friendly.
Start app, wait for gps, turn time wheel, press start.
edwinjm wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
Turn time wheel? How do you know in advance how long you
stay? Where I live, you start and when you leave, you click
stop. You also get reminders in case you forgot to stop.
deificx wrote 5 hours 16 min ago:
Not GP, but I guess I'm using the same app. You guess (and
then it gives you the price up front). 10 minutes before it
expires it asks you if you want to extend it. There might
also have been a detect if you drive away and stop feature
(don't recall).
Mostly these days all paid parking has registration
camera's, and it just starts and stops parking for you
automatically. However, there are like 3 or so apps that
compete here so you need a profile with all of them for
this to work and you also need to enable this on all the
apps.
StilesCrisis wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
They get paid more if you get a parking ticket.
petesergeant wrote 11 hours 24 min ago:
The RyanAir model of technically legal, but actively playing
a zero-sum game against their consumers' diligence.
CamperBob2 wrote 13 hours 43 min ago:
(Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a
good walk anyway.
There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking.
If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking
distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to
spend some quality time at your next city council meeting
making yourself a royal PIA.
542354234235 wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
I donât think a monopoly requires literally every possible
option to be controlled by the monopolistic entity.
Also, I only have time for so many hills on which to die.
Iâm not sure parking reform, while worthy, makes the cut.
vel0city wrote 11 hours 59 min ago:
You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The
City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private
corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion
dollars. The private company made it back in the first
decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when
they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the
parking as revenue compensation. [1] This doesn't apply to
private pay lots though, so there's still some amount of
"choice".
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Parking_Meters
jacquesm wrote 8 hours 30 min ago:
So, the officials that signed that deal went to jail,
right?
harikb wrote 11 hours 23 min ago:
Sometimes I think, it should be illegal for these
government contracts to last beyond 5 years for exactly
this reason. Who know what kind of deals are being made.
Some administration could sign away the whole country on
their last day.
specproc wrote 9 hours 15 min ago:
It's straight up corruption, pure and simple. The UK is
also full of this crap. The officials and executives
who've facilitated and profited from this robbery should
be jailed.
cyberax wrote 13 hours 30 min ago:
LOL. All the city parking spots around here are managed by
PayByPhone, and pretty much all private parking spots are
DiamondParking paid through ParkMobile.
I raised the issue with my local city council rep. She didn't
care.
prasadjoglekar wrote 14 hours 38 min ago:
There's also the unfortunate stick of a much larger parking
ticket that is even more trouble to contest.
Workaccount2 wrote 15 hours 15 min ago:
Plenty of people on here looking to disrupt a market with
tech...c'mon guys, get on it
Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work
(and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money),
which is issuing government enforced fines.
wlesieutre wrote 13 hours 42 min ago:
The crappy apps that replaced parking meters are the people
who disrupted the existing market with tech
AznHisoka wrote 16 hours 32 min ago:
You are also a developer though, and developers are notorious for
wanting self serve.
Someone who works in finance or conpliances might want a demo, or
views those things as signals the product is for serious use cases.
dpkirchner wrote 16 hours 17 min ago:
Sure, and they should have that option. But in my experience
business-folks ask techies to evaluate services all the time, and
ideally we can just start out in the low-/no-touch tier to feel
things out. If that tier isn't available, us techs might just try
a different service.
timr wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
The kind of products hidden behind sales calls are generally
the sort where the opinion of IC-level tech staff is next to
irrelevant. With these kinds of products, the purchase decision
is being made at a group level, the contract sizes are large,
and budgetary approvals are required. Itâs a snowball the
size of a house, and it started rolling down the mountain
months (or years) before it got to your desk. Literally nobody
cares if you buy a single license or not, and if you
(personally) refuse to try it because it doesnât have
self-service, youâll be ignored for being the bad stereotype
of an âengineerâ, or worse.
About the only time youâll be asked to evaluate such a
product as an IC is when someone wants an opinion about API
support or something equivalent. And if you refuse to do it,
the decision-makers will just find the next guy down the hall
who wonât be so cranky.
TheTaytay wrote 11 hours 44 min ago:
I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a
âsmall/mediumâ startup can easily sign contracts for
single services for $100k+, and in my experience, salespeople
really do care about commissions at those price points.
A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with
the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that
request or approve software.
Github and Slack are good examples of services who make very
good use of their ability to self-serve their customers out
of the gate, in spite of also supporting very large orgs.
In these conversations, I never ever see the buyers
justifying or requesting a sales process involving people and
meetings and opaque pricing.
Itâs true that complicated software needs more talking, but
there is a LOT of software that could be bought without a
meeting. The sales department wonât stand for it though.
timr wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
> A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting
with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the
ones that request or approve software.
Not really. Even if we keep the conversation in the realm
of startups (which are not representative of anything other
than chaos), ICs have essentially no ability to take
unilateral financial risk. The Github âdirect to
developerâ sales model worked for Github at that place
and time, but even they make most of their money on custom
contracts now.
Youâre basically picking the (very) few services that are
most likely to be acquired directly by end users. Slack is
like an org-wide bike-shedding exercise, and Github is a
developer tool. But once the org gets big enough, the
contracts are all mediated by sales.
Outside of these few examples, SaaS software is almost
universally sold to non-technical business leaders.
Engineers have this weird, massive blind spot for the
importance of sales, even if their own paycheck depends on
it.
sh34r wrote 17 hours 18 min ago:
> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price
discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a
customer
You say that as if it isnât the entire reason why these
interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should
be a crime.
nicbou wrote 16 hours 45 min ago:
Certain purchases (like health insurance in my country) should be
a conversation, because the options are fiendishly complex and
the attributes people typically use for comparison are wrong. The
consequences are lifelong.
sceptic123 wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
I thought thees things were complex on purpose to make it hard
for people to easily understand and compare so you have to
speak to a sales person who can do the upselling
Hendrikto wrote 4 hours 23 min ago:
But not a conversation to a sales rep who will just push
whatever gives them the largest commission.
xboxnolifes wrote 16 hours 55 min ago:
Pricing tiers are a form of dynamic pricing. Service free tiers
basically couldn't exist without dynamic pricing, as they are
subsidized by the paying tiers.
pooper wrote 17 hours 11 min ago:
> You say that as if it isnât the entire reason why these
interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing
should be a crime.
Does segmentation also count as dynamic pricing?
--
The IT guy at Podunk Lutheran College has no money: Gratis.
The IT guy at a medium-sized real estate agency has some
money: $500.
The IT guy at a Fortune 100 company has tons of money:
$50,000.
(HTM) [1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edit...
Terr_ wrote 14 hours 38 min ago:
Not parent poster, but I think a more practical approach is to
ban secret discriminatory pricing.
If everybody can see the prices that would be quoted in other
circumstances, that exerts a strong moderating force against
abuse.
It won't help you if there's a monopoly, but I consider that a
separate problem needing separate solutions.
transcriptase wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
The entire lab supply industry is disgusting in this respect.
The funding (and recent grants) that a given professor or
research lab has is generally publicly available information
that vendors will buy in easily digestible formats from brokers
and companies that scrape the websites of major granting
agencies.
All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will
require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much
money youâve received recently and even has an outline what
research you plan to do over the next few years since even the
detailed applications often get published alongside funding
allocations.
The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use
it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X
depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available
knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically
spend.
lokar wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
A group of research universities should start a non-profit
co-op to produce this for them.
Getting just the university of California should be enough
critical mass.
xmcqdpt2 wrote 4 hours 4 min ago:
Depends on the product. Some products just have a single
supplier for the whole world over, because they are
extremely specialized.
It's not uncommon though for eg departments to have common
equipment that they negotiate together.
Sevii wrote 18 hours 37 min 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.
dekhn wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
The thing to understand about google services is that they see so
much spam and abuse that it's easier for them to just assume you
are a spammer rather than a legitimate customer, unless you go
through other channels to establish yourself.
LiamPowell wrote 18 hours 1 min 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]
(HTM) [1]: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR1293876955...
Workaccount2 wrote 16 hours 13 min ago:
It might seem vindictive, but these are the ads that google shows
people who block all of Googles tracking or are new/blank
profiles. Hear me out...
When Google has a bad/empty profile of you, advertisers don't bid
on you, so it goes to the bottom feeders. Average (typically tech
illiterate) people wandering through the internet mostly get ads
for Tide, Chevy, and [big brand], because they pay Google much
more for those well profiled users. These scam advertisers really
don't pay much, but are willing to be shown to mostly anyone.
They are a bit like the advertiser of last resort.
All of that is to say, if you are getting malware/scam ads from
Google, it's probably because (ironically) you know what you are
doing.
binsquare wrote 18 hours 15 min 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.
fersarr wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
My attempts always had validation issues that stopped the ads from
running but I never figured it out and stopped trying
aerhardt wrote 18 hours 50 min 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 havenât finished your tokens?!
throwup238 wrote 17 hours 55 min ago:
> How can you have any tokens if you havenât finished your tokens?!
Another rate limit in the wall.
SamvitJ wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
Clever :)
tigranbs wrote 18 hours 56 min 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!
semi-extrinsic wrote 17 hours 51 min 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.
arielcostas wrote 18 hours 0 min 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...
cj wrote 18 hours 30 min 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 wrote 14 hours 48 min ago:
The OpenAI api key generation was simple and using it no problem.
No different from stripe.
The limits are annoying.
Havoc wrote 18 hours 58 min 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
impure wrote 17 hours 27 min 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.
BoorishBears wrote 18 hours 30 min 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.
notepad0x90 wrote 18 hours 59 min 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 wrote 18 hours 44 min 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 wrote 18 hours 33 min 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 wrote 17 hours 19 min 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 wrote 16 hours 35 min 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.
nikanj wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
This reminds me of the âI just want to serve 5 terabytesâ thing
Google does not want your money, they donât know how to count so low
kevindamm wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
Broccoli Man! classic [1] (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
(HTM) [1]: https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI
vessenes wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
And the remaster!
(HTM) [1]: https://mbleigh.dev/posts/broccoli-man-remastered/
CamperBob2 wrote 13 hours 29 min ago:
Hey man, nice slop! (No, really, that's great.)
h02 wrote 19 hours 10 min 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 $250 in Google Cloud spend, and your first payment has to be
more than 30 days ago. I was going to build my side project using
Gemini 3 Pro, but gave up after that.
athrowaway3z wrote 19 hours 10 min ago:
I didn't even need to read the article to upvote, and doing so just
confirmed my assumption that somebody finally wrote down their
frustration with Gemini.
My fucking god, how has Google not flagged the failure of onboarding
devs like Claude / Codex?
3 days ago I was literally thinking, I want to throw 20$ 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 wrote 18 hours 10 min 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 wrote 9 hours 26 min 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
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