[HN Gopher] Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
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Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
Author : speckx
Score : 85 points
Date : 2025-12-10 20:29 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ankursethi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ankursethi.com)
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| h02 wrote:
| 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.
| nikanj wrote:
| This reminds me of the "I just want to serve 5 terabytes" thing
|
| Google does not want your money, they don't know how to count so
| low
| kevindamm wrote:
| Broccoli Man! classic
|
| https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI (2010)
|
| To be fair, a lot of this changed after that video became a
| meme.. but I'd bet that the broccoli man template is still
| trending on memegen
| vessenes wrote:
| And the remaster! https://mbleigh.dev/posts/broccoli-man-
| remastered/
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| "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.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yeah can't figure out WTH is going on in google's AI ecosystem
| either.
|
| They absolutely deserve credit for their free tier API keys
| though. That's unheard of in big cloud - an actual you can't
| shoot yourself in the foot with a life ruining bill thing. Can't
| recall what part of their product maze I got it from but it seems
| to do what it says on tin
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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.
| tigranbs wrote:
| Yeah, then try adding more quotas to scale your usage; you will
| feel the pain! But, to be fair, it is way easier than the AWS
| Bedrock or Microsoft Azure!
| cj wrote:
| 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.
| aerhardt wrote:
| I had to warm up a Gemini API project worth a few thousand hours
| during weeks so that I could get to the tier that allowed me to
| carry out the workload.
|
| How can you have any tokens if you haven't finished your tokens?!
| dannyobrien wrote:
| The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just
| ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable
| things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying
| ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a
| lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they
| entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small
| businesses felt they were getting the same treatment as more
| faceless, distant big businesses.
|
| I have a friend that says Google's decline came when they bought
| DoubleClick in 2008 and suffered a reverse-takeover: their
| customers shifted from being Internet users and became other,
| matchingly-sized corporations.
| Sevii wrote:
| That has definitely changed. Google AdWords today is one of the
| most unfriendly services to onboard I've ever encountered.
| Signing up is trivial, setting up your first ad is easy, then
| you instantly get banned. Appeals do nothing. You essentially
| have to hire a professional just to use it.
| fersarr wrote:
| My attempts always had validation issues that stopped the ads
| from running but I never figured it out and stopped trying
| binsquare wrote:
| 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.
| nl wrote:
| 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.
| axi0m wrote:
| Gosh, this story resonates so much with me... I had the exact
| same experience few days ago, desperately trying to get a small
| agent prototype working for a quick demo. I spent an good hour
| dealing with that pile of nonsense. Online payments and accounts
| management have been mastered for 20 years now, why do we still
| have to endure such things? It just kills me. The same goes with
| Azure (and all MS online-related services), if not even worse.
| modeless wrote:
| 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.
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| 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.
| neom wrote:
| I complained about this on HN recently and Logan responded and
| asked me to email him with feedback on how I'd like the
| experience to work (I didn't, sorry Logan, been busy :)) - Logan,
| to his credit, is very active _everywhere_ reading and soliciting
| feedback. I think they 're going to be giving it a pretty big
| bump on ux/ui of AI studio next month. It's easy to see he's a
| super smart guy trying to build something complex within a
| massive machine - given how focused on the product he appears to
| be, I have high hopes.
|
| https://x.com/OfficialLoganK
| gxs wrote:
| This is a longstanding issue we've had, not just with Gemini
|
| Even with something as simple as google workspace - permissioning
| service accounts and authentication are a pain in the ass
|
| The docs suck and of course there's no one to help
| sirfz wrote:
| I find GCP frustrating (coming from AWS) but luckily asking
| Gemini how to do things makes it much easier.
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