Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
by speckx on 12/10/2025, 8:29:12 PM
https://ankursethi.com/blog/gemini-api-key-frustration/
Comments
by: Ozzie_osman
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:<p>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).<p>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.<p>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).
12/11/2025, 5:01:09 AM
by: dannyobrien
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.<p>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.
12/10/2025, 10:10:48 PM
by: rozap
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.<p>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.<p>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.
12/11/2025, 6:42:49 AM
by: asim
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.<p>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.
12/11/2025, 7:01:50 AM
by: logankilpatrick
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 : )<p>Will follow up on some of the other threads in here!
12/11/2025, 7:41:35 PM
by: plaidfuji
> 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.<p>100% agree
12/10/2025, 11:07:38 PM
by: levocardia
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!<p>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?
12/11/2025, 2:18:55 AM
by: obmelvin
I don't understand the multiple posts / comments I've seen about this.<p>I google `gemini API key` and the first result* is this docs page: <a href="https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key" rel="nofollow">https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key</a><p>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.<p>* besides sponsored result for AI Studio<p>(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)
12/10/2025, 11:10:37 PM
by: msp26
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.<p>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.<p>OpenAI has more generous limits on the schemas and clearer docs. <a href="https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#supported-schemas" rel="nofollow">https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#s...</a>.<p>You guys closed this issue for no reason: <a href="https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/issues/660" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/issues/660</a><p>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.
12/11/2025, 2:34:17 AM
by: neom
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 <i>everywhere</i> 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.<p><a href="https://x.com/OfficialLoganK" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/OfficialLoganK</a>
12/10/2025, 10:31:58 PM
by: niwtsol
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.
12/10/2025, 10:59:48 PM
by: lxe
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".
12/11/2025, 5:27:22 AM
by: arjunchint
We built an AI Web Agent on top of Gemini.<p>We actually created shortcut for the agent itself to go to AI Studio, create API key, and configure itself haha: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ywfLrG_W8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ywfLrG_W8</a>
12/11/2025, 9:11:34 PM
by: Havoc
Yeah can't figure out WTH is going on in google's AI ecosystem either.<p>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
12/10/2025, 10:01:53 PM
by: cicloid
Amazon has Q, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot…<p>Names that mean everything, nothing or something based on what website you land or what sales pipeline you are on.
12/11/2025, 9:16:11 PM
by: modeless
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.
12/10/2025, 10:18:10 PM
by: rodolphoarruda
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.<p>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.<p>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.
12/11/2025, 12:34:00 PM
by: koinedad
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.
12/10/2025, 11:52:24 PM
by: happyopossum
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: <a href="https://one.google.com/intl/en/about/google-ai-plans/" rel="nofollow">https://one.google.com/intl/en/about/google-ai-plans/</a><p>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.
12/11/2025, 4:52:15 PM
by: aerhardt
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.<p>How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?!
12/10/2025, 10:09:43 PM
by: Arubis
Similarly to DeepSeek, this—more than dealing with different APIs and routing—is the problem OpenRouter actually solves for me.
12/11/2025, 2:46:59 PM
by: nl
You literally cannot buy Antigravity with a non-personal Google account.<p>I read someone on here who is using Gemini via OpenRouter because it was the only way they could pay for it.
12/10/2025, 10:13:53 PM
by: therealmarv
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).<p>I only went through it because I got once 300 USD for free to spend on my Google Workspace account I/my business owns.<p>OpenAI API usage is so much easier.<p>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?
12/11/2025, 12:00:01 PM
by: vinhnx
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.<p>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.
12/11/2025, 3:12:27 AM
by: btown
In case it's helpful to anyone, <a href="https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview</a> is useful to know about.<p>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.
12/11/2025, 12:37:37 AM
by: ankit219
Think its a combination of factors.<p>- 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.<p>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.<p>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).
12/11/2025, 4:21:25 AM
by: happyopossum
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…
12/10/2025, 11:20:46 PM
by: rtaylorgarlock
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.
12/10/2025, 10:19:55 PM
by: wg0
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.
12/11/2025, 8:54:29 AM
by: jwr
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.<p>Claude code just works.
12/11/2025, 9:32:03 AM
by: jpollock
There is a lot of fraud with UPI, specifically social engineering to obtain UPI OTP codes.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://support.stripe.com/questions/background-on-indian-government-regulations-affecting-card-payments#:~:text=E%2Dmandates%20for%20recurring%20payments,any%20time%20through%20their%20bank." rel="nofollow">https://support.stripe.com/questions/background-on-indian-go...</a>
12/10/2025, 11:50:48 PM
by: phromo
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.
12/11/2025, 9:44:26 AM
by: tigranbs
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!
12/10/2025, 10:03:27 PM
by: bobjordan
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.
12/11/2025, 6:56:01 AM
by: Simplita
I thought it was just me. The onboarding experience feels unintentionally hostile for new developers.
12/11/2025, 7:11:22 AM
by: odie5533
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.
12/11/2025, 9:07:37 AM
by: crocowhile
I got a Gemini API key once. I was overcharged £350, took me ages to find a way to file a complain, and at the end they refunded me only the google charges and not the VAT.<p>Never again, thanks.
12/11/2025, 10:26:34 AM
by: krisgenre
Maybe they want more free users to better train their models and don't care about the money (which they already have in plenty?).<p>In the grand scheme of things, paid users are minuscule. They are probably delighted because of all the free users.
12/11/2025, 7:14:43 AM
by: axi0m
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.
12/10/2025, 10:17:28 PM
by: runtimepanic
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.
12/11/2025, 8:44:42 AM
by: bambax
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.<p>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.
12/11/2025, 10:34:46 AM
by: intothemild
I like using Gemini for general stuff,<p>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.<p>Nope sorry no way. I want a simple $X per month sub.<p>Claude gives me that. Which is why Claude wins.
12/11/2025, 12:26:54 AM
by: scirob
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
12/11/2025, 9:32:35 AM
by: scosman
Gemini API keys are an absolute delight compared to VertexAI. It’s like Google decided the most important part of competing with AWS was a horrific console.
12/11/2025, 3:33:33 PM
by:
12/11/2025, 1:07:50 AM
by: rvnx
Setting up a limit of spending is even more difficult
12/11/2025, 12:54:06 AM
by: temp1611
Google is the most political, extractive and dysfunctional cloud from a customer point of view.<p>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).<p>2. Billing is opaque, you get charged for things you haven't used<p>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)<p>4. Overall behavior from various Google staff has been high-handed - to say the least<p>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.<p>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 :)
12/11/2025, 10:41:22 AM
by: drob518
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.
12/11/2025, 2:28:33 PM
by: dvorka
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.
12/11/2025, 8:28:22 AM
by: Aeolun
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.
12/11/2025, 6:19:33 AM
by: windex
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.
12/11/2025, 9:56:13 AM
by: h02
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.
12/10/2025, 9:49:48 PM
by: arihant
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.
12/11/2025, 2:52:15 AM
by: postsantum
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
12/10/2025, 11:11:25 PM
by: andy99
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.<p>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.
12/10/2025, 11:14:26 PM
by: consumer451
Wasn't this type of Google thing clearly called out in the Karpathy Software 3.0 talk?<p>It's interesting to me this UX problem is not readily solved.<p>What is the sticking point in a big org? I don't have a point of reference.
12/10/2025, 10:59:46 PM
by: francoispiquard
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.
12/11/2025, 11:29:02 AM
by: notepad0x90
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.<p>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.<p>Googlers are awesome/mean well, if only enough of them lurked here :)
12/10/2025, 10:00:42 PM
by: nkotov
I had a similar experience with GCP / Google Workspace. It's just bad experience.
12/11/2025, 2:59:13 PM
by: KerrickStaley
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.
12/11/2025, 3:03:06 AM
by: heystefan
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.
12/10/2025, 11:47:34 PM
by:
12/10/2025, 10:27:29 PM
by: tgtweak
Have you looked at getting an openai api key for gpt5? you have to do selfie-ID verification...
12/11/2025, 2:20:28 PM
by: ianberdin
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.
12/11/2025, 6:27:51 AM
by: nikanj
This reminds me of the ”I just want to serve 5 terabytes” thing<p>Google does not want your money, they don’t know how to count so low
12/10/2025, 9:53:37 PM
by: squirrellous
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.
12/11/2025, 2:20:22 AM
by: ryuuseijin
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).
12/10/2025, 11:18:44 PM
by: srijanshukla18
Yes, tried countless hours and even reached out to google billing support. Doesn't accept UPI or card, runs into an error with both.
12/11/2025, 8:13:22 AM
by: twsted
Same for me. Tried just a few days ago and, frustrated, gave up.
12/11/2025, 1:41:33 PM
by: SamDc73
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 …
12/11/2025, 5:13:29 AM
by: senthilnayagam
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 )<p>I use replicate, fal for all api and for LLM openrouter
12/11/2025, 1:05:01 AM
by: butterlesstoast
Similar experience for our business
12/11/2025, 3:49:14 PM
by: erdemo
I am glad to see someone write about this, google API dashboards are ... crap.
12/11/2025, 10:38:19 AM
by: homakov
i wasted an hour setting up a key. Antigravity rejected me even though my VPN was set to New York.<p>Nowhere close to claude/codex experience. Unusable dev experience
12/11/2025, 1:02:22 PM
by: binarymax
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.
12/11/2025, 1:41:22 AM
by: magictux
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.
12/11/2025, 7:22:50 AM
by: dsmurrell
I avoid using Google because their cloud service product is so badly designed.
12/11/2025, 8:51:50 AM
by: robertheadley
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.
12/10/2025, 11:14:49 PM
by: aspenmayer324
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!
12/11/2025, 7:39:15 AM
by: eezing
It looks AI won’t replace software engineers after all.
12/11/2025, 2:03:28 AM
by: GuestFAUniverse
Oh, another Google API rant.<p>I knew I never want to use another Google service as soon as I got rclone running with my Google Drive: <a href="https://rclone.org/drive/" rel="nofollow">https://rclone.org/drive/</a><p>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.
12/11/2025, 9:05:43 AM
by: athrowaway3z
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.<p>My fucking god, how has Google not flagged the failure of onboarding devs like Claude / Codex?<p>3 days ago I was literally thinking, I want to throw 20$ to try out Gemini alongside my Claude and Codex subs.<p>It took me a few minutes to realize its just not worth my time to figure out how.
12/10/2025, 9:49:02 PM
by: martythemaniak
1. I typed "How do I get a gemini api key" in my chrome bar<p>2. Firs line in the top result said "click here and then click the Get Key Button". I clicked the link and went to the page.<p>3. On the page I clicked "Get Key"<p>4. I named the key, then selected "New project" from the dropdown. I named the new project<p>5. I now have a key.<p>I actually timed myself, it took 34 seconds. This is a garbage ragebait post.
12/11/2025, 3:52:24 PM
by: h33t-l4x0r
Did you ask Gemini how to do it? <i>ducks rotten tomatoes</i>-
12/11/2025, 12:49:28 PM
by: AmazingTurtle
Yeah and people keep posting shit about how google will win over openai due to their "long breath"
12/11/2025, 5:12:45 PM
by: KnuthIsGod
How long before Gemini is killed by Google and gets a nice grave at Killed By Google ?<p><a href="https://killedbygoogle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://killedbygoogle.com/</a><p>I give it a single digit number of years.
12/11/2025, 2:46:43 AM
by: m3kw9
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
12/11/2025, 5:53:51 PM
by: CSMastermind
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.<p>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.
12/11/2025, 5:04:40 AM
by: arielcostas
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?).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
12/10/2025, 11:09:48 PM
by: sirfz
I find GCP frustrating (coming from AWS) but luckily asking Gemini how to do things makes it much easier.
12/10/2025, 10:53:06 PM
by: gxs
This is a longstanding issue we’ve had, not just with Gemini<p>Even with something as simple as google workspace - permissioning service accounts and authentication are a pain in the ass<p>The docs suck and of course there’s no one to help
12/10/2025, 10:48:22 PM
by: journal
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.
12/11/2025, 8:09:51 AM
by: lysecret
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.
12/11/2025, 11:09:09 AM
by: DeathArrow
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.
12/11/2025, 6:04:28 AM
by: g-unit33
Wait until the 429 error message
12/11/2025, 12:48:51 AM
by: doctorpangloss
Not being able to sign up for stuff is in the same league as being perpetually low on disk space.
12/11/2025, 4:45:18 AM
by: huevosabio
This nonsense alone justifies the existence of OpenRouter.
12/11/2025, 2:26:37 AM
by: guelo
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.
12/11/2025, 5:12:54 AM
by:
12/10/2025, 9:52:49 PM
by: sylware
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...).<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.
12/11/2025, 10:31:06 AM
by: arand
a hack you this went to a can go to you so good hahahahaha§hah§aha
12/11/2025, 8:36:56 AM
by: notatoad
[flagged]
12/11/2025, 12:12:30 AM
by: JonaScott
[flagged]
12/11/2025, 6:42:41 AM
by: kunley
> I was fifteen minutes into writing some code by hand like a Neanderthal<p>Tell me this isn't classism. Tell me this kind of narrative isn't a new norm
12/11/2025, 3:16:57 AM
by: rand17
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.<p>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?<p>No creative worker in human history was so overjoyed to devalue his or her work and knowledge in such haste.
12/11/2025, 6:30:19 AM