Comment by panarky

Your link shows the free tier gets 100 Pro requests per day.

That matches my experience with a free account. With Gemini CLI it doesn't seem to matter if I log in with a Google Account or use an API key from AI Studio with billing disabled.

Yesterday I had two coding sessions in Gemini CLI with a total of 73 requests to Pro with no rate limiting.

https://imgur.com/a/Ki6g1qc

I can't explain why you're seeing something else, but my experience has been pretty consistent.

Maybe your usage pattern is different from mine and you're getting hit by the 5 RPM limit??