[HN Gopher] Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
___________________________________________________________________
Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
Author : speckx
Score : 792 points
Date : 2025-12-10 20:29 UTC (1 days 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.
| madiele wrote:
| Had the same problem, wanted to use gemini but wanted to
| setup a speeding limit, turns out Google would prefer you to
| risk bankruptcy for a mistake, no spending limit available
| from what I understood, ended up going with openrouter and
| using gemini through them instead
| h02 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/
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Hey man, nice slop! (No, really, that's great.)
| 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.
| marcuskaz wrote:
| :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:
| None of those are development tasks. IT tasks, I'd buy,
| but anyone deeply entrenched in IT are more likely going
| to want more powerful tools (even if harder to use).
| Vercel is geared towards the small groups where there are
| some developers on staff, but the budget makers are
| playing double-duty in IT roles.
| Havoc 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.
| impure wrote:
| The free tier is good but they've been cracking down on rate
| limits. Just recently they significantly dropped the max
| requests per day.
| tigranbs 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.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The OpenAI api key generation was simple and using it no
| problem. No different from stripe.
|
| The limits are annoying.
| arielcostas wrote:
| I'd say Bedrock is the easiest since you just log into your AWS
| account, get an AWS credential in the same way you would for
| any other service (if you're on EC2 it's even easier) and call
| the endpoints from the SDK. Azure though...
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I recently had the distinct displeasure of being the first to
| set up a service in Azure on a new tenant at Microsoft.
|
| Of course I first had to faff about adding the company credit
| card, which took five tries and two days. Then I found I had to
| create the appropriate resource group, before I could set up a
| service. Fair enough, it might make sense later to have costs
| divided up like that. After I got the resource group, I then
| thought to start simple and spin up a single VM.
|
| This gave me an error message saying that my request exceeded
| the quota. Which quota? The built-in copilot in Azure chewed on
| the raw error in its JSONness, and helpfully told me I could
| find the Azure quota page by searching for it in the Azure
| portal.
|
| Once I entered the quota page, I was greeted with a message
| saying that I was now in the new quota experience in public
| preview mode. After many clicks I found the appropriate line
| for the desired VM SKU in the desired region, where it said I
| had used 0 of the quota of 30. So why didn't it work? I tried
| to request an increased quota, just in case. That process spent
| five minutes on "please wait", then failed with a generic error
| message.
|
| At that point I started googling around, and eventually in some
| forum thread I found the missing piece: my resource group did
| not yet have a subscription. After more faffing about, I got a
| subscription associated with my resource group. What is a
| subscription, you ask, and what is the relation between a
| tenant, a subscription and a resource group? I haven't the
| foggiest, but I've clicked enough buttons to make the errors go
| away. Por ahora.
| aerhardt 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?!
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> How can you have any tokens if you haven't finished your
| tokens?!_
|
| Another rate limit in the wall.
| SamvitJ wrote:
| Clever :)
| 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.
| LiamPowell wrote:
| Yet it's still absolutely inundated with scams and
| occasionally links that directly download malware[1] that
| they don't action reports on. I don't think the process needs
| to be easier if they already can't keep up with moderation.
|
| [1]: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR12938769
| 5568...
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| josefresco wrote:
| I sell managed Google Ads services and have never had issues
| with my clients being banned. Google Ads sucks for 1000 other
| reasons.
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
| sh34r wrote:
| > 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 isn't the entire reason why these
| interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing
| should be a crime.
| pooper wrote:
| > You say that as if it isn't 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.
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-
| edition/
| transcriptase wrote:
| 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 you've 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| Terr_ wrote:
| 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.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| 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.
| nicbou wrote:
| 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.
| Hendrikto wrote:
| But not a conversation to a sales rep who will just push
| whatever gives them the largest commission.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| 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
| nicbou wrote:
| Nope. I built a calculator for that last year and ooooh
| boy. Now I pipe half the requests to a human because of
| all the possible mistakes a person can make. It's crazy
| complicated.
|
| Finding that human is also hard because of the perverse
| incentives to sell more lucrative products.
| sceptic123 wrote:
| That's my point, you need to be a specialist to
| understand it, but the specialists are incentivised to
| upsell you.
|
| A simpler product would be better for consumers, but
| won't happen because there are industries (and a lot of
| lobbying) built up around keeping the money train
| rolling.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Every time I go to a presentation about the health care
| options I have, it ends up just being the representative
| reading off a slide with the actual information. All the
| information I need is in print. I have never received a
| single piece of valuable information that wasn't easier
| to get just reading the docs myself.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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. It's 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 doesn't have
| self-service, you'll be ignored for being the bad
| stereotype of an "engineer", or worse.
|
| About the only time you'll 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 won't be so cranky.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a
| "small/medium" 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.
|
| It's true that complicated software needs more talking,
| but there is a LOT of software that could be bought
| without a meeting. The sales department won't stand for
| it though.
| timr wrote:
| > 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 "direct to
| developer" sales model worked for Github at that place
| and time, but even they make most of their money on
| custom contracts now.
|
| You're 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| This is really not true in my experience. In fact, all my
| experience has been with products that aren't THAT
| expensive, and the individual dev teams do decide. These
| are SaaS products, and sometimes the total cost is under
| $1000 a year, and I still can't get prices without
| contacting sales.
|
| Also, it isn't just ICs. I have worked as a senior
| director, with a few dozen people reporting into me...
| and I still never want to talk to a sales person on the
| phone about a product. I want to be able to read the
| docs, try it out myself, maybe sign up for a small plan.
| Look, if you want to put the extras (support contracts,
| bulk discounts, contracting help, etc) behind a sales
| call, fine. But I need to be able to use your product at
| a basic level before I would ever do a sales call.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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:
| Parking apps don't seem to care much for that. They know
| you'll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection
| because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical
| payment kiosks removed and replaced with "download our
| shitty app!" notices.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| 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:
| The crappy apps that replaced parking meters _are_ the
| people who disrupted the existing market with tech
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| There's also the unfortunate stick of a much larger
| parking ticket that is even more trouble to contest.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| (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.
| cyberax wrote:
| 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.
| vel0city wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Parking_Meters
|
| This doesn't apply to private pay lots though, so there's
| still _some_ amount of "choice".
| harikb wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| So, the officials that signed that deal went to jail,
| right?
| 542354234235 wrote:
| I don't 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.
| I'm not sure parking reform, while worthy, makes the cut.
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| They get paid more if you get a parking ticket.
| petesergeant wrote:
| The RyanAir model of technically legal, but actively
| playing a zero-sum game against their consumers'
| diligence.
| deinonychus wrote:
| i'm currently disputing a bill with a parking company.
| there's a kiosk at the movie theater served by the
| parking lot, so that you can get free parking if you see
| a movie. the kiosk has an option for you to describe your
| car if you forgot your license plate number. i did that
| and they sent me a bill for unpaid parking.
|
| customer service is unable to acknowledge why that
| feature is offered and can only assert that if you park
| you gotta pay. after threatening to complain to the BBB
| and my state AG they have graciously offered to drop the
| ticket to $25.
|
| thank you for listening to me vent :)
| Mashimo wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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.
| baobun wrote:
| There is no way this is not a degradation compared to a
| physical meter accepting cash plus whatever. My country
| doesn't really have parking apps yet here and paying for
| parking is never a friction.
| dbspin wrote:
| At least in my country they face no competition. For a
| given location, only one app will work.
| brightball wrote:
| 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 it's 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You're not the target customer.
| Arainach wrote:
| 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:
| Who said anything about free? OP wanted to pay Google $100.
| Arainach wrote:
| 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:
| Well, then give me self-signup with a clearly outlined
| verification flow that I can follow from A to Z.
|
| If you give 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. On the other hand, if you
| really need to make me wait several days while you
| manually review my info, fine, just tell me upfront so I
| can stop wasting my time. And be consistent in your UI as
| to whether I'm verified yet. 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. I won't believe for a second that trillion-
| dollar companies like Google don't know how to keep abuse
| at a manageable level without making people run in
| circles.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > 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:
| > sales wanting direct contact with clients
|
| But what do the clients want? Your business should not be
| structured to make sales people happy.
| arjie wrote:
| 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.
| biglyburrito wrote:
| 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.
| eitally wrote:
| My current employer offers three tiers of licensing with
| clearly articulated prices & benefits (the lowest of which
| is free), but also offers a "Custom - let's talk" option
| because the reality is that sometimes customer situations
| are complicated and bespoke contracts make sense, but at
| least the published pricing provides directional guidance
| heading into a discussion. I think this is reasonable.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > use their sales skills
|
| Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn
| what AI can replace.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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:
| For enterprise deals.
| 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| 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:
| > 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:
| I already said how I'm calling Gemini
|
| > direct API Calls
|
| I suspect Antigravity to be a big flop like gemini-cli.
| They are so bad in this area they couldn't even write an
| extension or fork oss-code, instead spending $2B to pork an
| open source project with someone else's branding
| axi0m 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.
| jwrallie wrote:
| Having moved from one country to another, I tripped all kinda
| of anti fraud systems and the only way out was to share my ID
| with every other company. It's annoying but one common thing is
| that anti fraud systems seem to require humans in the loop, so
| it's better to give up and get back to it next day.
|
| The most annoying company I dealt with was Blizzard. I just
| wanted to play a game but it took days of back and forth,
| meanwhile I started to play something else and lost interest.
| rtaylorgarlock 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.
| mrj wrote:
| 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.
| 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
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| mvkel wrote:
| 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:
| Dev rel is part of PR department isn't it? At least that's
| how it has always seemed to me when it comes to these mega
| corps.
| gxs 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.
| consumer451 wrote:
| 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:
| It will be politics, it's always politics. Large orgs works a
| lot like the feudal system.
| consumer451 wrote:
| 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.
| niwtsol wrote:
| The article lightly mentions it, but how AWS and Google Cloud
| Console are so absolute nonsensical in UX and ease of use is
| beyond comprehension.
| polalavik wrote:
| holy hell google cloud is so confusing i just ended up using (a
| much more expensive) digital ocean droplet instead for a little
| project. I guess they only really care about enterprise
| customers who can burn tons of money figuring it out, but it
| made me never want to use it again.
|
| Same with google ads - super fuckin shit UI/UX, super confusing
| to understand what is going on.
|
| companies like digital ocean, supabase, etc can make money
| (from people like me) because they just circumvent the bullshit
| or wrap the dogshit experience (aws) into a much better
| experience. bless supabase.
| herpdyderp wrote:
| DigitalOcean is such a dream to use. I also really appreciate
| all their guides for almost everything web server related.
| sbrother wrote:
| How is their managed Kubernetes product nowadays? I've
| realized all I really use on GCP and AWS is managed
| Kubernetes and Postgres, and I feel like I must be
| overpaying particularly for GPU instances.
| TheTaytay wrote:
| Well said.
|
| I'm literally afraid of the cloud console dashboards from the
| big providers. That's especially true with the quagmire that
| is AWS. It's so easy to leave a resource turned on that you
| are no longer using, and so hard to tell which resource
| belongs to which project, or have high confidence you set up
| permissions correctly. They have multiple products whose only
| job is to monitor and configure your AWS accounts. Multiple.
| That's not a brag. That's an admonition.
|
| Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Render, etc, seem to have figured out
| how to rent millions of dollars of computers and services out
| every month without requiring you to become "certified" on
| their platform.
| polalavik wrote:
| This 1000%. The Ui is so convoluted I'm scared that I'll
| leave something on and be charged a fortune.
| sofixa wrote:
| 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.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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!
| doganugurlu wrote:
| 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 forth...
| sofixa wrote:
| > 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:
| https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-55241
| niwtsol wrote:
| 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.
| heymijo wrote:
| 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 don't forget that error message being returned when you
| try to call the API is because you didn't give your project the
| proper permissions in google cloud console. What permissions do
| you need? -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| Google Cloud Console feels like being stuck in the seventh
| circle of hell.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| > The "Set up billing" link kicked me out of Google AI Studio and
| into Google Cloud Console, and my heart sank. Every time I've
| logged into Google Cloud Console or AWS, I've wasted hours upon
| hours reading outdated documentation, gazing in despair at graphs
| that make no sense, going around in circles from dashboard to
| dashboard, and feeling a strong desire to attain freedom from
| this mortal coil.
|
| 100% agree
| arielcostas wrote:
| Wait until you see Azure. Apparently you need to create either an
| "Azure OpenAI" or a "Microsoft Foundry", where AFAIK (got an
| email last week) Foundry now includes everything AI including
| "Azure OpenAI", the former "Cognitive Services" (for speech,
| computer vision and other stuff) and inference on non-OpenAI
| models. But wait, because once you create that, you are told to
| go to another portal (ai.azure.com) where you get an "old"
| foundry experience and anew one that can't be enabled for every
| project. Oh, wait, did I mention there apparently used to be a
| "Foundry" and a "Foundry Project"? Oh, and all those apparently
| work with a single API key, unless (I guess) you set up
| authentication with the Azure SDK, which makes you go back to
| Azure Portal (or maybe Entra ID?).
|
| All of that while trying to explain to your non-technical boss
| how he can browse the voices available at "the Azure thingy" to
| pick his favourites to then pick and use in the project due
| relatively soon. Since, of course, you told him the original
| Cognitive Speech Services (or Speech Services, or Cognitive
| Services-Speech, or whatever they decided to call it on that
| specific page) semi-public URL where he could browse the gallery
| was "speech.microsoft.com" which is now semi-dead with awful
| loading times that seem some server issue and has been happenning
| for a few months now. Or tell them to go to the "new foundry"
| where he might not be able to find the resource or might not have
| stuff in the regions you were using up until then, or whatever
| crap this 3.56 trillion-dollar company decides to throw at you to
| prevent you from using their services.
|
| And all of this is the exploration phase, where you just use the
| GUIs and copy things around until they work. Then you need to
| figure out what you did (and more importantly, where) to be able
| to write some Terraform/OpenTofu or Bicep or similars to try and
| keep the environment replicable to avoid the excruciating pain of
| repeating every single step you followed to get it on a working
| state.
|
| At the very least, Google was nice enough to launch Vertex AI
| inside GCP for enterprises that have figured that out, and then
| Google AI Studio as an almost completely separate thing that only
| is bound to Google Cloud for billing purposes, similar to how
| Firebase is integrated too.
| obmelvin wrote:
| I don't understand the multiple posts / comments I've seen about
| this.
|
| I google `gemini API key` and the first result* is this docs
| page: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key
|
| That docs page has a link in the first primary section on the
| page. Sure, it could be a huge CTA, but this is a docs page, so
| it's kinda nice that it's not gone through a marketing make over.
|
| * besides sponsored result for AI Studio
|
| (Maybe I misunderstood and all the complaints are about billing.
| I don't remember having issues when I added my card to GCP in the
| past, but maybe I did)
| verdverm wrote:
| Most of them are correlating gemini-cli experience (trash) with
| the broader access to Gemini via studio or cloud (not at all a
| problem)
| Leynos wrote:
| They could always just use OpenCoder, Crush or Goose with
| OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-
| preview)
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| openrouter just gives you prompt in, result out in
| standard openai api format.
| verdverm wrote:
| These projects are all a level above open router, they
| call the same standard APIs, or even custom ones and
| manage the translation. They do a lot more as well
|
| ADK has an option to use litellm (openrouter
| alternative), among many options
|
| https://google.github.io/adk-docs/agents/models/#using-
| cloud...
| amluto wrote:
| > Gemini via studio
|
| Excuse me? If you mean AI Studio, are you talking about the
| product where you can't even switch which logged in account
| you're 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
| it's extremely unclear how an organization is supposed to pay
| for it?
| rezonant wrote:
| 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...
| amluto wrote:
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| 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:
| seriously, just use different chrome profiles, but part
| of the issue is that they are so interwoven you pretty
| much have to do this
| andoando wrote:
| I always have a buggy ass hell experience with having
| multiple google accounts pretty much across all their
| services. I've been wondering if its just me or how the
| hell this is normal.
| verdverm wrote:
| Yeah, with multiple chrome profiles, you have to be
| mindful of which one you last had focused before clicking
| a link from an external application (i.e. tailscale), so
| that it opens the new tab in the right instance so the
| account(s) you use in it are available
|
| Def use multiple chrome profiles if you aren't. You can
| color code them to make visual identification a breeze
| rezonant wrote:
| I'm aware of multiple Chrome profiles and I do not want
| to use them. Google should simply make their account
| switching consistent across their apps and work sensibly
| in these corner cases.
| verdverm wrote:
| "simply" is doing a lot of work, profiles is the outcome
| of addressing the problems you are talking about. Many
| people enjoy them and find them useful. Why are you
| against using them?
| rezonant wrote:
| Simply isn't doing much work, account switching works
| just fine on GMail, search, maps, calendar etc. The issue
| is that some Google apps do not follow the standard of
| the overall fleet. Google gives us the account switching
| feature, it's obviously an intended way to use their
| products. Otherwise they would not give you that and tell
| you to use browser profiles.
|
| I don't want my history, bookmarks, open tabs and login
| sessions at every website divided among my 5 GSuite
| workspace accounts and my 1 personal Gmail. That adds a
| bunch of hassle for what? The removal of a minor
| annoyance when I use these specific Google apps? That is
| taking a sledge hammer to a slightly bent nail.
|
| If it works for you, great, that's why it's there. But
| doing this for anything more than the basic happy path
| setup of "I have one personal account and 1 GSuite work
| account" is nuts in my opinion.
| verdverm wrote:
| 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
| arthurfirst wrote:
| 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| > 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
|
| My spend is lower, so I conclude otherwise
|
| > I think the issue with cli tools for many is...
|
| Came from that world, vim, nvim, my dev box is remote,
| homelab
|
| The issue is not that it is a CLI, it's that you are trying
| to develop software through the limited portal of a CLI.
| How do you look at multiple files at the same time? How do
| you scroll through that file
|
| 1. You cannot through a tool like gemini-cli
|
| 2. You are using another tool to look at files / diffs
|
| 3. You aren't looking at the code and vibe coding your way
| to future regret
|
| > or me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not
| feasible.
|
| vim is a "gui" (tui), vs code has keyboard shortcuts,
| associating GUI with mouse work
|
| > 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.
|
| Anecdotal "vibe" opinions are not useful. We need to do
| some real evals because people are telling stories like
| they do about their stock wins, i.e. they don't tell you
| about the losses.
|
| Thousands of hours sounds like your into the vibe coding /
| churning / outsourcing paradigm. There are better ways to
| leverage these tools. Also, if you have 1000+ hours of LLM
| time, how have you not gone below the prepackaged
| experience Big AI is selling you?
| politelemon wrote:
| 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.
| malfist wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| malfist wrote:
| 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
| ipaddr wrote:
| 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.
| mediaman wrote:
| 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.
| leopoldj wrote:
| As the article states, generating the key itself is easy. But
| getting credit and billing are the issues.
| knollimar wrote:
| I have it running and calling but it's not showing the usage
| and I set it up the day gemini 3 came out
| kro wrote:
| Agree, Google made it really easy here, compared to using
| service account certificates like with some of their other
| APIs.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| 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 -- I
| honestly don't know if they test these UX flows with their own
| personal accounts, or if something is buggy with my account.
| pants2 wrote:
| 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
| bobviolier wrote:
| https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1978897746921693572?s=20
| TheTaytay wrote:
| Yes, I get the impression he has been fighting this fight
| internally since the day he arrived. He can't exactly talk
| about how infuriating it must be, but I look forward to his
| memoir.
| altbdoor wrote:
| 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.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/how-
| can-i-use-fine-tuned-mod...
| obmelvin wrote:
| I could've made my comment more clear. Definitely missing a
| statement along the lines of "and then after creating, you
| click 'set up billing' and link the accounts in 15 seconds"
|
| I did edit my message to mention I had GCP billing set up
| already. I'm guessing that's one of the differences between
| those having trouble and those not.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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.
| postsantum wrote:
| 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:
| Apple as well. Apple developer sign up refuses to accept my
| government issued ID.
|
| So fuck them, I decided. Sold all my Apple hardware but phone
| and watch. Downgraded phone to basic bitch when my last one
| died
| andy99 wrote:
| I use OpenAI and Anthropic APIs every day for work. I have never
| used google Gemini precisely because there seems to be a whole
| different set of friction involved in getting an account. First I
| don't want to tie anything to my google account, especially any
| form of payment (no idea if I actually need to do this). Second I
| don't want AI studio or whatever, I just want a similar api to
| the others I can hit.
|
| I admit I'm completely ignorant about what's really involved, I
| have never tried and am just going on vague things I've heard but
| stories like this definitely reinforce my perception. I even have
| a mistral account, grok, etc, but google feels like a whole other
| level of complication.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I feel you on not wanting to tie anything additional to your
| Google account. Will I somehow do something "naughty" (say spam
| an emoji during a livestream) that gets me permanently banned
| for life from all services?
|
| Google really needs to evaluate separating service bans. I
| cannot be the only one who would rather go to a competitor than
| risk angering the black box and destroying my digital life.
| robertheadley wrote:
| I had issues too, I wanted to use my free Google API credits with
| Roo Code, but I could never get it to work. I eventually got
| Gemini Cli and now Antigravity to work.
| ryuuseijin wrote:
| Just a note that you can use opencode with their API gateway
| (they call it "zen") to get access to all the most popular models
| using a single account, including gemini. (Although this wouldn't
| have helped the author, since they wanted to try the Gemini CLI
| specifically).
| happyopossum wrote:
| The underlying issue here is that 3.0 is still in preview. Once
| it's a GA model, you can just use your $20 consumer Ai pro sub
| and skip all the GCP stuff...
| heystefan wrote:
| I had the same experience. Plus you never know what's the best
| way to use eg. Nano Banana -- it works better in AI Studio versus
| their regular Gemini chat.
| jpollock wrote:
| There is a lot of fraud with UPI, specifically social engineering
| to obtain UPI OTP codes.
|
| Since the card and the account haven't been previously
| associated, that's probably a risk model saying a human needs to
| verify the account before activation.
|
| Indian cards also (I believe) have a mandatory 24 notice period
| prior to money being pulled - giving fraudsters a 24 hour
| starting gun to spend like crazy. That makes merchants that
| provide variable cost service on credit products twitchy.
|
| https://support.stripe.com/questions/background-on-indian-go...
| koinedad wrote:
| 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:
| I work with GCP regularly. Once you're familiar with their
| approach, it's straightforward enough. But the situation with
| Gemini is on a whole different level.
| intothemild wrote:
| 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:
| That's fine but you're missing out, and you're most likely
| paying waay more than you need to.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Missing out on nothing
| btown wrote:
| In case it's helpful to anyone,
| https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview is useful to
| know about.
|
| Adding another layer on top of Google's own APIs adds latency,
| lowers reliability, and (AFAIK) doesn't allow batch mode - but if
| that's tolerable, it avoids the mess that is Google Service
| Account JSON and Cloud Billing.
| numlocked wrote:
| (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.
| g-unit33 wrote:
| Wait until the 429 error message
| wosat wrote:
| 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.
| rvnx wrote:
| Setting up a limit of spending is even more difficult
| movedx01 wrote:
| Is that even possible? Last time I checked it wasn't, while it
| was possible with OpenAI. Since that moment(early this year) -
| OpenAI has removed that option and their "Project budget"
| feature turned from being a hard limit into an email
| notification.
| senthilnayagam wrote:
| 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
| binarymax wrote:
| The same billing experience applies to the Google programmable
| search api. Easy to get a key, but a Byzantine maze to pay for
| more than the free version.
| eezing wrote:
| It looks AI won't replace software engineers after all.
| levocardia wrote:
| Add me to the list of "saw nano banana pro, attempted to get an
| API key for like 5min, failed and gave up." Maybe I am a dummy
| (quite possible) but I have seen many smart people similarly
| flummoxed!
|
| You can walk into a McDonalds without being able to read, write,
| or speak English, and the order touchscreen UI is so good (er,
| "good") that you can successfully order a hamburger in about 60
| seconds. Why can't Google (of all companies) figure this out?
| JohnMakin wrote:
| because the bubble in which googlers exist is inherently user-
| hostile, even to their own detriment. been like this for a
| while
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| 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:
| I wonder if they actually see their current users as profit
| centers. The tech is still being built out, to some extent
| they just need users to find out how it gets used and to
| get experience in the space. The real appeal of this entire
| space is its future potential, so they just may not care
| that much about providing a good consumer-grade experience
| at this stage.
| andy99 wrote:
| I tried at some point to sign up for whatever IBMs AI cloud was
| called. None of the documentation was up to date, when you
| clicked on things you ended up in circular loops that took you
| back where you started. Somehow there were several kinds of api
| keys you could make, most seemingly decoys and only one correct
| one. The whole experience was like one of those Mario castle
| levels where if you don't follow the exact right pattern you
| just loop back to where you started.
|
| It makes sense for IBM, seems like google is just reaching that
| stage?
| drak0n1c wrote:
| I use a third party API aggregator/forwarder (VeniceAI) for
| this reason.
| mrieck wrote:
| At least Google models like Nano Banana Pro release Day 1 on
| https://fal.ai
|
| I made a free Chrome extension that uses Fal api key if you
| want a UI instead of code
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-slop-canvas/dogg...
| squirrellous wrote:
| As a former employee, the engineering culture at Google gives me
| old-school hacker vibes, so users are very much expected to
| "figure it out" and that's somewhat accepted (and I say this with
| fond memories). It's no surprise the company struggles with good
| UX.
| gilrain wrote:
| > users are very much expected to "figure it out" and that's
| somewhat accepted
|
| That sounds like a really fun place to work but a really awful
| business to be a customer of.
| huevosabio wrote:
| This nonsense alone justifies the existence of OpenRouter.
| msp26 wrote:
| Hi if the Gemini API team is reading this can you please be more
| transparent about 'The specified schema produces a constraint
| that has too many states for serving. ...' when using Structured
| Outputs.
|
| I assume it has something to do with the underlying constraint
| grammar/token masks becoming too long/taking too long to compute.
| But as end users we have no way of figuring out what the actual
| limits are.
|
| OpenAI has more generous limits on the schemas and clearer docs.
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#s....
|
| You guys closed this issue for no reason:
| https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/issues/660
|
| Other than that, good work! I love how fast the Gemini models
| are. The current API is significantly less of a shitshow compared
| to last year with property ordering etc.
| KnuthIsGod wrote:
| How long before Gemini is killed by Google and gets a nice grave
| at Killed By Google ?
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| I give it a single digit number of years.
| arihant wrote:
| I think now the Google One AI Pro subscription directly works for
| raising limits on the CLI? But otherwise, there is an Individual
| subscription. The problem is it doesn't work out of the box. You
| have to create a whole Google Cloud project and attach the API to
| it to get it to work. Otherwise the CLI would stop logging you
| in, which it did when the account was free. The worst part is if
| that cloud project had any code in it, CLI will use it as context
| on every prompt.
| KerrickStaley wrote:
| In my personal experience, OpenRouter makes it easy to call
| Gemini 3 Pro Preview and other frontier LLMs with very little
| setup. It's great for projects where you want to compare
| different LLMs or have the flexibility to switch. It charges a
| 5.5% fee on top of the base API price so at scale you would want
| to switch to directly calling the provider.
| vinhnx wrote:
| 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:
| 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.
| kunley wrote:
| > 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:
| I can't tell if you might be joking. If you are, the rest of
| this comment is irrelevant.
|
| That general idiom is old and fairly widely used. There was a
| Seinfeld episode in 1997 in which Elaine talked about "...not
| lurching around like a caveman."
|
| If you're objecting to criticism of writing code by hand, the
| phrase is almost invariably used in a self-deprecating way,
| acknowledging some inefficiency or old-fashioned behavior with
| comic hyperbole. It's not criticizing people who write code by
| hand as such - the author is criticizing themselves for doing
| something the hard way.
| kunley wrote:
| Thank you. Seinfeld reference does it.
|
| About the "hard way", everything in the article is screaming
| that OP's new way of coding is the hard way, not the other
| way around
| gilrain wrote:
| You came in hot with a wrong assumption couched in absolute
| terms... and, after correction, you're flouncing out with
| the same irrelevent message.
|
| I'm an AI skeptic, but this ain't it.
| antonvs wrote:
| Isn't it just the Gemini key aspect that's hard? That's not
| specific to this way of coding, just to Google's half-baked
| mish-mash of offerings.
|
| He should have used OpenAI or Anthropic - instead of using
| Google, like a Neanderthal.
| ankit219 wrote:
| Think its a combination of factors.
|
| - Google cloud is setup for big organizations. Not for
| individuals. All cloud providers are pretty much confusing in a
| similar way. - India has specific rules re cybersecurity and
| financial regulations that Google has to comply. (mandatory id
| verification and kyc compliance). Others have asked for an id
| check too.
|
| From what confused me, if OP wanted to use a model, the easier
| way would have been to pay cursor/windsurf etc. and select that
| model. Usually that is how people try out a new model. Trying out
| a specific way means going through the norms every country
| imposes, and bloat in case of legacy products.
|
| AWS and Azure have come up with their own models. If their future
| versions hit close to sota and people want to use it, many would
| end up in a similar loop (and woudl be easier to just use it from
| the aggregators).
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Not being able to sign up for stuff is in the same league as
| being perpetually low on disk space.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| I was recently (vibe)-coding some games with my kid, and we
| wanted some basic text-to-speech functionality. We tested
| Google's Gemini models in-browser, and they worked great, so we
| figured we'd add them to the app. Some fun learnings:
|
| 1. You can access those models via three APIs: the Gemini API
| (which it turns out is only for prototyping and returned errors
| 30% of the time), the Vertex API (much more stable but lacking in
| some functionality), and the TTS API (which performed very poorly
| despite offering the same models). They also have separate keys
| (at least, Gemini vs Vertex).
|
| 2. Each of those APIs supports different parameters (things like
| language, whether you can pass a style prompt separate from the
| words you want spoken, etc). None of them offered the full
| combination we wanted.
|
| 3. To learn this, you have to spend a couple hours reading API
| docs, or alternatively, just have Claude Code read the docs then
| try all different combinations and figure out what works and what
| doesn't (with the added risk that it might hallucinate
| something).
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Some other fun things you'll find:
|
| - The models perform differently when called via the API vs in
| the Gemini UI.
|
| - The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry
| logic is basically mandatory.
|
| - API performance is heavily influenced by the whims of the
| Google we've observed spreads between 30 seconds and 4 minutes
| for the same query depending on how Google is feeling that day.
| DANmode wrote:
| So, not something for a production app yet.
| ianberdin wrote:
| Even funnier, when Pro 3 answers to a previous message in my
| chat. Just making a duplicate answer with different words.
| Retry helps, but...
| specproc wrote:
| 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.
| walthamstow wrote:
| 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.
| ashwindharne wrote:
| 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.
| hobofan wrote:
| > 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:
| 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.
| jwillp wrote:
| I've been impressed by ollama running locally for my
| work, involving grouping short text snippets by semantic
| meaning, using embeddings, as well as summarization
| tasks. Depending on your needs, a local GPU can sometimes
| beat the cloud. (I get no failures and consistent
| response times with no extra bill.) Obviously YMMV, and
| not ideal for scaling up unless you love hardware.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Which models have you been using?
| phantasmish wrote:
| It'd be kinda nice if they exposed whatever queuing is
| going on behind the scenes, so you could at least
| communicate that to your users.
| halflings wrote:
| "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.
| te_chris wrote:
| The way the models behave in Vertex AI Studio vs the API is
| unforgivable. Totally different.
| akhilnchauhan wrote:
| > 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.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| 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:
| > 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:
| there's prob a couple ppl out there with an Amex Black
| parked on a cloud acct, lol
| te_chris wrote:
| 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.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| 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:
| 12. Release your first version.
|
| 13. Get your whole google account banned.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| 14. Ask why it was banned and they respond with something
| like "oh you know what you did".
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| Ha, bold of you to assume they'll respond!
| CSMastermind wrote:
| It's so terrible. I cannot tell you the hours I've wasted trying
| to find a way to see all the Gemini API keys generated in my
| organization and I have been unsuccessful. I've tried AI Studio,
| GCP, and Google Admin.
|
| We've reverted to everyone at the company just using the API key
| I created because I can't figure out a way to give anyone else
| visibility into keys and usage.
| guelo wrote:
| Not just gemini, my sense is that many of google's products are
| collapsing in terms of confusing features and quality. I use to
| be a fanboy but I've been painfully extracting myself from their
| ecosystem, more because of the constant churn of product issues
| than because of any political issues. I suspect it's an instance
| of conway's law where the org chart has become a disaster after
| all the layoffs and reorgs.
| SamDc73 wrote:
| A while back it took me around ~20 minutes to figure out how to
| subscribe to Gemini CLI and when done I couldn't even verify
| within the CLI ...
| lxe wrote:
| I always wondered how something like AWS or GCP Cloud Console
| admin UIs get shipped. How could someone deliver a product like
| these and be satisfied, rewarded, promoted, etc. How can Google
| leadership look at this stuff and be like... "yup, people love
| this".
| jiggawatts wrote:
| A purer, more perfect example of Conway's Law has never been
| made more manifest than the myriad AWS consoles, each further
| partitioned by region.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
|
| And see especially _"The Only Unbreakable Rule"_ by Molly
| Rocket: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY
| Aperocky wrote:
| 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:
| Along with the public APIs, An AWS service can also have
| Console APIs that are specifically for the console. These
| APIs do not have the same constraints as the public api.
|
| (My team built the MediaLive service)
| theflyinghorse wrote:
| What are the chances that Google leadership even seen GCP
| interface outside of a demo once a never?
| DANmode wrote:
| Google doesn't have leadership, it has shareholders.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| It seems like they don't want to make money out of it right now
| and it was mostly a show off to prove they can do it. That, or
| massive incompetence.
| Aeolun wrote:
| This is exactly my experience with gemini, and exactly why I
| bounced on the stupid thing. I just don't have hours to waste on
| Google's stupid processes.
| kkarpkkarp wrote:
| And exactly same here. I wonder how much money they lose
| because of this poor process.
|
| I am not going to use Gemini API in foreseen future as I don't
| want to manage those keys anymore. No matter how good their
| model is
| ianberdin wrote:
| I had even worse experience with Microsoft Azure. In the middle
| of the path I realized a third-party sales "ultra real Microsoft
| support, certified" is dealing with me in order to sell me
| overpriced options.
| rand17 wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| 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:
| > 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.
| rozap wrote:
| I wasted several hours this week going around in the exact same
| circles. We have a billing account, but kept hitting a gemini
| quota. Fine. But then on the quota page, every quota said 0%
| usage. And our bill was like $5. Some docs said check AI studio,
| but then the "import project from google cloud to AI studio"
| button kept silently failing. This was a requests per minute
| quota, which was set at 15 (not a whole lot...) but wouldn't
| reset for 24 hours. So then I kept making new projects so I could
| keep testing this thing I'm building, until eventually I ran out.
|
| The only way we could get it resolved was to (somehow) get a real
| human at google on the phone because we're in some startup
| program or something and have some connection there. Then he put
| in a manual request to bump our quota up.
|
| Google cloud is the most kafkaesque insane system I've ever had
| the misfortune of dealing with. Every time I use it I can tell
| the org chart is leaking.
| jacquesm wrote:
| For the last decade or so I get a second $0.85 monthly bill
| from google. Nobody at google knows why, but they recommend to
| leave it because who knows what could be disabled if I block
| those payments. Interesting detail here is that this is on a
| bank account that we stopped using in 2017, so the only reason
| we are keeping that account alive is for these stupid google
| payments. In the cloud environment there is an invoice for the
| amounts, but no way to change the billing info to our current
| account and also no way (not by us, not by google support) to
| figure out what these payments are actually for...
|
| Calling it kafkaesque is giving it too much credit.
| gikkman wrote:
| I recently got an email saying a project I got is at the risk
| of being disabled because my payment information is invalid.
| But the card I got registered for it is the same I've had the
| last two years, and it's still valid cause I used it
| yesterday. Also, there is no amount due as far as I can tell.
| I haven't done anything with the project for 6 month, it's
| just sitting there. No API usage, nothing.
|
| So I got no idea what to do to address it. I feel my best
| option is wait for it to get disabled and try to address it
| afterwards.
| kyrra wrote:
| 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).
| MrOrelliOReilly wrote:
| 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!
| alexp2021 wrote:
| Exactly the same for me. Quote usage is something like 2%, but
| constantly experience the quota limit error.
| Filligree wrote:
| The trick here is that they describe internal loadshedding as
| quota limits.
|
| There's a quote for your general class of query, and there's
| a quota for how many can be in flight on a given server. It's
| not necessarily about you specifically.
| bobjordan wrote:
| I went through similar song and dance using a paid Gemini code
| assist "standard" level subscription. I finally got Gemini 3
| working in my terminal in my repository. I assigned it a task
| that Claude code Opus 4.5 would quickly knock out, and Gemini 3
| did a reasonably similar job. I had opus 4.5 evaluate the work
| and it was complimentary of Gemini 3S work. Then I check the
| usage and I'd used 10% of the daily token usage limit, about 1.5M
| tokens on that one task. So I can only get about 10 tasks before
| I'm rate limited. Meanwhile with Claude code $200 max plan, I can
| run 10 of those same caliber of tasks in parallel, even with opus
| 4.5 model, and barely register the usage meter. The only thing
| the Gemini code assist "standard" plan will be good for with
| these limits are just double checking the plans that opus 4.5
| makes. Until the usage limits are increased, it's pretty useless
| compared to Claude code max plan. But there doesn't seem to be
| any similar plan offering from Google.
| asim wrote:
| 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:
| > The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is
| painfully hard to achieve
|
| It does make you wonder, why not just be a lot smaller? It's
| not like most of these teams actually generate any revenue. It
| seems like a weird structural decision which maybe made sense
| when hoovering up available talent was its own defensive moat
| but now that strategy is no longer plausible should be
| rethought?
| BozeWolf wrote:
| And yet google generates around $1.9miljon revenue per
| employee per year. Which is a lot, almost as good as
| competitors.
| asim wrote:
| Two reasons. 1 - they print cash through Ads which means
| there's opportunity or desire to do more things, or even a
| feeling like you should or can. So new products emerge but
| also to try diversify the revenue stream. 2 - the continuous
| hiring and scale means churn, people get bored, they leave
| teams, they want to do something new, it all bifurcates. It
| keeps fragmenting and fragmenting until you have this
| multilayered fractal. It's how systems in nature operate so
| we shouldn't think corporation's will be any different. The
| only way to mitigate things like this is putting in places
| limits, rules and boundaries, but that also limits the upside
| and if you're a public company you can't do that. You have to
| grow grow grow and then cut cut cut and continue in that
| cycle forever or until you die.
| Simplita wrote:
| I thought it was just me. The onboarding experience feels
| unintentionally hostile for new developers.
| krisgenre wrote:
| Maybe they want more free users to better train their models and
| don't care about the money (which they already have in plenty?).
|
| In the grand scheme of things, paid users are minuscule. They are
| probably delighted because of all the free users.
| magictux wrote:
| ahah I'm really vibing with this post, I went through the same
| idea as the OP - wanted to try gemini 3 and/or nano banana - and
| as soon as I was thrown into the billing management panel of
| Google Cloud and their whole linking process I bailed.
| aspenmayer324 wrote:
| It's great that so many smart people are trying to fix this and
| build something amazing. Let's hope it gets easier for everyone
| soon!
| journal wrote:
| Won't be adding them then. Not worth the struggle from what I
| read here. You think it's plug-n-play just swap a model id and
| endpoint, nope, Chuck Testa.
| srijanshukla18 wrote:
| Yes, tried countless hours and even reached out to google billing
| support. Doesn't accept UPI or card, runs into an error with
| both.
| dvorka wrote:
| This is so true! But the adventure doesn't end there. I have 2
| billing accounts from the past when I was building projects on
| AppEngine. Annual exercise to keep them alive (even if no action
| is needed in the end) is of similar complexity. Why do I need
| these accounts? Because I want to use Google services for which I
| don't pay.
| arand wrote:
| a hack you this went to a can go to you so good
| hahahahahaSShahSSaha
| runtimepanic wrote:
| The experience feels fragmented because Google has multiple
| overlapping developer consoles and product boundaries. Gemini
| just exposes that underlying fragmentation more clearly than
| other APIs.
| dsmurrell wrote:
| I avoid using Google because their cloud service product is so
| badly designed.
| wg0 wrote:
| I love Google's product managers. I love product managers in
| general but Google's product managers are at a whole another
| level. And it shows.
| GuestFAUniverse wrote:
| Oh, another Google API rant.
|
| I knew I never want to use another Google service as soon as I
| got rclone running with my Google Drive:
| https://rclone.org/drive/
|
| I rather not waste my time with such abominations. And I don't
| mean rclone. I don't care about the "history" of that API, or any
| API. It's like strangers telling you their live's story at the
| first meeting. Awkward.
| odie5533 wrote:
| 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:
| We're a reasonably sized company. Recently we needed to change
| our google cloud payment details.
|
| Finance users had changed in the meantime, so I navigate and
| create an iam user, ok, billing administrator is a thing,
| great.
|
| Oh, they said it didn't work? alright, there seems to be a
| project billing administrator as well as an organisation
| billing administrator? weird, ok let's try that.
|
| Hmm... it still didn't work? let's look around a little more.
| Ok, within the billing account (that they're a billing
| administrator to) and within the organisation (that they're a
| billing administrator to) there is a tab called "payment
| users". This seems to be _separate_ from their IAM users, and
| the person needs to be added there (as well as? instead of? who
| knows) and _then_ they can change the card details.
|
| UX is especially crap here (for google cloud billing).
|
| Let's not even get started on the whole vertex vs. aistudio
| stuff. Also when one of the gemini's came out their python
| library worked while their curl docs, and their ruby client
| didn't so we had to read the source of the python library to
| figure out what it actually did under the hood to test it out.
| (this was a while ago, I think they might've gotten better
| since but the documentation/devex was really bad at at the
| time)
| jwr wrote:
| I also tried to make Gemini work with opencode and after spending
| about an hour in various panels, billing settings, setting up
| access groups, project groups, and other paraphernalia, gave up.
| There is Google Cloud, Vertex AI, Oauth which works or does not
| depending on whatever, all the "groups" and other crap I don't
| need, overall I just failed.
|
| Claude code just works.
| scirob wrote:
| Agreed, only thing that kinda makes up for the huge number of
| steps is that the GCP build in Ai assistant is actually great at
| telling you what to do via CLI
| phromo wrote:
| I had a similar experience. However I gave up before being able
| to pay. Repeated the story two or three times. This was work for
| a medium sized Corp and in the end we didn't even give gemini a
| chance because of this (performance was sufficiently good with
| competing providers) . Really hope they up their UX.
| windex wrote:
| Google's interface, UX and information flow is complete
| spaghetti. You never know what you will find and where. There is
| no one you can call either. I suspect they abandon their products
| because 50% of potential customers abandon their cart due to the
| workflow.
| crocowhile wrote:
| I got a Gemini API key once. I was overcharged PS350, took me
| ages to find a way to file a complain, and at the end they
| refunded me only the google charges and not the VAT.
|
| Never again, thanks.
| sylware wrote:
| You should be able to create an API account with a classic
| noscript/basic (x)html browser (optionally with an email, and
| that could be an IPv[46] literal email address, you know, self-
| hosted & DNS free, which is stronger than SPF...).
|
| Then to pay for, I should be able to redeem a code bought at my
| local and physical monetary terminals (no credit card info input
| on an internet able computer, even if elf/linux and lean classic
| noscript/basic (x)html web browsers) that to add credits on my
| account. Like steam. In my country, we even have codes for age
| verification only (you have physical age verification like when
| you buy alcohol from a [bottle] shop), much easier to crack down
| on abuse.
|
| Another thing could be a public "anonymous", severely rate
| limited, API key for 'testing purpose' or very rare usage, or a
| noscript/basic (x)html web site (namely a real and honest web
| site) with ads (text/image/videos[<video>])... and with solid
| handling of HTTP refresh?
|
| My main usage for AI would be coding. I am craving at mass
| porting C++ to a plain and simple subset of C code (it seems some
| people are getting reasonably good results, and it seems rust has
| a brain damaged syntax on the scale of c++), and assembly coding
| with very specialized code snippet.
| bambax wrote:
| 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:
| Leadership roles, especially in large corporations, often favor
| people who are opportunistic. They don't care about the
| product, they want that promo.
|
| And to win that promo you have to ship big and ship fast. So
| often times what you see is people delivering vaporware that
| has the _appearance_ of high quality (lots of promises, looks
| amazing in the slides deck, carefully selected data shows great
| numbers, etc). It's a gamble, and sometimes it pays off.
|
| By the time people accept that it's hot garbage, the leaders
| have already moved on to the next opportunity. And it's not
| that they were able to fool their managers, because their
| managers are playing the same game on an even larger scale, so
| they care even less.
|
| Of course, this is not always the case. But there is a bias,
| and it tends to show up more in large organizations
| (government, large corporations, etc.)
| erdemo wrote:
| I am glad to see someone write about this, google API dashboards
| are ... crap.
| temp1611 wrote:
| 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:
| >Startup credits require multiple follow-ups, meetings, etc.
| And these reps have weird incentive structures (so they are
| trying to bypass each other to meet their quotas or whatever).
|
| Man, I tried going for the credits. I've organised meetups and
| conferences for Google, gave talks, been a part of Google
| Startup campus for years now, have been invited to participate
| in GDE program, and as I'm making a GenAI startup I decided
| "well, maybe time to try getting those 300k cloud credits, I've
| given them so much I'll surely get it".
|
| Well, the first person I talked to, said I'm denied, because
| they didn't even check the websites I added in the description.
| They said oh I need to add it to another field for their team
| to see, told me to update it, but there is no way to update it.
| Then we had a second call, they said it's okay I can ignore
| that and pointed me to another person who will be my "account
| manager".
|
| That person was absolutely uninterested into what we're doing,
| what we want and what we plan to do. They did not even care
| about helping us much until we reached 15k monthly spend or so,
| giving a holier-than-thou attitude and sounding like they're
| making lunch during the call. I'd rather have the call with an
| LLM at this point.
|
| Then even though our website says our product relies on AI, it
| is impossible without AI and I explained to him how and why we
| train custom models and use their GenAI products - the person
| decided we are not an AI company and can only get 2k in Cloud
| credits.
|
| The interaction left such a sour taste in my mouth that I will
| _never_ use Google Cloud in our product, as I do not want to
| have to deal with the Account Manager.
| lysecret wrote:
| I see this, a hot take form my side as someone who is bought in
| to GCP i quite like being able to put everything on the same
| billing account / handle it easily through service accounts.
| francoispiquard wrote:
| I think they are trying too much to have you jump on GCP. Having
| a simpler UI with a credit limit (maybe even at a different rate)
| would actually get more people to use it imo.
| therealmarv wrote:
| Try to get a Google Vertex API key working locally. It's even
| more complicated. Took me literally one full day to get the whole
| toolchain working (had to do some pauses out of frustration).
|
| I only went through it because I got once 300 USD for free to
| spend on my Google Workspace account I/my business owns.
|
| OpenAI API usage is so much easier.
|
| Btw Google: Fix Google Console API usage dashboard... why is
| there a delay of 2+ days? Why cannot I see (and block!) the usage
| of the current day?
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| 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:
| 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:
| (I work at OpenRouter) Certainly for individual developers /
| hobby projects that's the primary value prop; super easy
| access to all of the models.
|
| But there's a _lot_ more functionality that becomes relevant
| when building in production. We do automatic fallbacks, route
| between providers based on data policies, syndicate your data
| to agent observability tools / your logging platform of
| choice, user-level and api-key-level budget management and
| model allow/block lists, programmatic API key management,
| etc, etc. More good stuff shipping all the time!
| h33t-l4x0r wrote:
| Did you ask Gemini how to do it? _ducks rotten tomatoes_ -
| gilrain wrote:
| Yes, that's part of the article you didn't read.
| homakov wrote:
| i wasted an hour setting up a key. Antigravity rejected me even
| though my VPN was set to New York.
|
| Nowhere close to claude/codex experience. Unusable dev experience
| twsted wrote:
| Same for me. Tried just a few days ago and, frustrated, gave up.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Have you looked at getting a gpt api key for gpt5? you have to do
| selfie-ID verification...
| drob518 wrote:
| Yea, I went through this exact fiasco a few months ago trying to
| do the same thing. Or rather, I went through the first two-thirds
| of it and then gave up.
| Arubis wrote:
| Similarly to DeepSeek, this--more than dealing with different
| APIs and routing--is the problem OpenRouter actually solves for
| me.
| nkotov wrote:
| I had a similar experience with GCP / Google Workspace. It's just
| bad experience.
| happyopossum wrote:
| There are plenty of ways to get access to gemini - a single
| google search took me directly to the simplest way (subscribe to
| Google AI Ultra) in one click:
| https://one.google.com/intl/en/about/google-ai-plans/
|
| The author apparently found himself on a much more difficult
| path, one designed for enterprises who are already on google
| cloud, already have billing set up, etc. The fact that an
| individuals experience with an enterprise platform isn't great is
| predictable... That's why there are individual/consumer plans for
| this stuff.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| The url you sent, when signing up, just sends me to my homepage
| where I get a overview of my subscription at one.google.com, I
| can't see where to access a api key
| 85392_school wrote:
| Does it let you use Gemini 3 in Gemini CLI?
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| Yeah and people keep posting shit about how google will win over
| openai due to their "long breath"
| m3kw9 wrote:
| is a land min in that UI interface, you never know what you
| enabled/disabled and get fked over by charges that came out of
| left field, or why it doesn't work. google continues to be a UX
| shit show
| logankilpatrick wrote:
| Hey! Very valid feedback on setting up a billing account. This is
| something I have been pushing for over the last 2 years at
| Google. The good news: setting up billing directly in AI Studio
| tested internally and will be shipped in January : )
|
| Will follow up on some of the other threads in here!
| mseri wrote:
| Finally! Great to hear. I had the exact same experience, but
| gave up at the moment of ID verification... too much hassle
| indeed
| mrieck wrote:
| Will that change also allow paying upfront ($250 or whatever)
| to bump up a tier?
|
| I want to release a service using computer-use but am worried
| about 429 quota errors if I have actual users.
| whalesalad wrote:
| > setting up billing directly in AI Studio tested internally
| and will be shipped in January
|
| Does this mean I can finally use premium features without
| onboarding my entire google workspace? I made the mistake of
| getting a good chunk of my family on my google app domain back
| in ~2007. For the last few years, I spend $80 per month just to
| host their email because the cost is easier to deal with than
| the human beings themselves. But I want to use the latest
| premium Google AI tooling and as far as I can tell the only way
| to do that is to upgrade my google workspace to the next tier
| and blow even more $$$ away each month. Suffice to say I have
| not done this, but it is a blocker from using things like Nano
| Banana with a non-gmail account.
| arjunchint wrote:
| We built an AI Web Agent on top of Gemini.
|
| We actually created shortcut for the agent itself to go to AI
| Studio, create API key, and configure itself haha:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ywfLrG_W8
| cicloid wrote:
| Amazon has Q, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot...
|
| Names that mean everything, nothing or something based on what
| website you land or what sales pipeline you are on.
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