Comment by logankilpatrick
19 hours ago
First off, apologies for the bad first impression, the team is pushing super hard to make sure it is easy to access these models.
- On permission issue, not sure I follow the flow that got you there, pls email me more details if you are able too and happy to debug: Lkilpatrick@google.com
- On overall friction for billing: we are working on a new billing experience built right into AI Studio that will make it super easy to add a CC and go build. This will also come along with things like hard billing caps and such. The expected ETA for global rollout is January!
Congrats on the move to Google!
Please allow me to rant to someone who can actually do something about this.
Vertex AI has been a nightmare to simply sign up, link a credit card, and start using Claude Sonnet (now available on Vertex AI).
The sheer number of steps required for this (failed) user journey is dizzying:
* AI Studio, get API key
* AI Studio, link payment method: Auto-creates GCP property, which is nice
* Punts to GCP to actually create the payment method and link to GCP property
* Try to use API key in Claude Code; need to find model name
* Look around to find actual model name, discover it is only deployed on some regions, thankfully, the property was created on the correct region
* Specify the new endpoint and API key, Claude Code throws API permissions errors
* Search around Vertex and find two different places where the model must be provisioned for the account
* Need to fill out a form to get approval to use Claude models on GCP
* Try Claude Code again, fails with API quota errors
* Check Vertex to find out the default quota for Sonnet 4.5 is 0 TPM (why is this a reasonable default?)
* Apply for quota increase to 10k tokens/minute (seemingly requires manual review)
* Get rejection email with no reasoning
* Apply for quota increase to 1 token/minute
* Get rejection email with no reasoning
* Give up
Then I went to Anthropic's own site, here's what that user journey looks like:
* console.anthropic.com, get API key
* Link credit card
* Launch Claude Code, specify API key
* Success
I don't think this is even a preferential thing with Claude Code, since the API key is working happily in OpenCode as well.
You went further with GCP than I did. I was asked repeatedly by support to contact some kind of a Google sales team.
I get the feeling GCP is not good for individuals like I. My friends who work with enterprise cloud have very high opinion about their tech stack.
> I get the feeling GCP is not good for individuals like I.
Google isn't good for individuals at all. Unless you've got a few million followers or get lucky on HN, support is literally non-existent. Anyone that builds a business on Google is nuts.
Give up i think
Then you actually use it! I dare someone to try and get Gemini live vertex app working.
Just a note that your HN bio says "Developer Relations @OpenAI"
Sure it will get updated to same as Linkedin - Helping developers build with AI at Google DeepMind.
Imagine many on here have out of date bio's and best part - it don't matter, but sure can make some funnies at times.
Just search the r/bard or r/geminiai subreddits for Logan. He's very famously a Google employee these days.
I was interested. I does look like he just needs to update that. His personal blog says google, and ex-openAI. But I do feel like I have my tin foil on every time I come to HN now.
Pretty funny! I wonder how much of a premium Google is paying.
The permission thing happens to me too, but very intermittently, usually a couple of hard refreshes of the tab clears it up, sometimes I need to delete the conversation I'd just tried to start and start a new conversation. I can't remember the exact message, sometime like you don't have permission or permission denied. If I had to guess it happens 1 in 5 sessions I load. The API key stuff would be a lot easier if it landed you on the correct page in the GCP portal when it directs you out of AI studio, I think that is the most confusing part of the experience, you end up on what seems like a random GCP billing page with no clear indication as to what it has to do with API keys.
When we first started using Gemini for a new product a few months ago you banned our entire GCP account from using at all Gemini in the middle of a demo to our board. Doesn't seem like things have improved all that much on the on boarding front.
Maybe the team should push hard before releasing the product instead of after to make it work.
But then we'd complain about Google being a slow moving dinosaur.
"Move fast and break things" cuts both ways !
(ex-Google tech lead, who took down the Google.com homepage... twice!)
Its not a new problem though, and its not just billing. The UI across Gemini just generally sucks (across AI Studio and the chat interfaces) and there's lots of annoying failure cases where Gemini will just timeout and stop working entirely midrequest.
Been like this for quite a while, well before Gemini 3.
So far I continue to put up with it because I find the model to be the best commercial option for my usage, but its amazing how bad modern Google is at just basic web app UX and infrastructure when they were the gold standard for such for like, arguably decades prior.
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We are talking here about the most basic things- nothing AI related. Basic billing. The fact that it is not working says a lot about the future of the product and company culture in general (obviously they are not product-oriented)
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this way is better. Burn in public, burn much faster.
Imagining the counterfactual (“typical, the most polished part of this service is the payment screen!”), it seems hard to win here.
No one should even notice the payment flow. This isn't Stripe where the polish on the payment experience is a selling point for the service. At Google, paying for something should be a boring but quick process that works and then gets out of the way.
It doesn't need to be good. It just need to be not broken.
That’s a pretty uncharitable take. Given the scale of their recent launches and amount of compute to make them work, it seems incredibly smooth. Edge cases always arise, and all the company/teams can really do is be responsive - which is exactly why I see happening.
A company with a literal embedded payment processor, including subscription services for half of all mobile users can't manage to take payments for their own public facing services seems like a huge fucking failure to me.
Especially for software developer and tech influencer focused markets.
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Why should the scale of their recent launches be a given? Who is requiring this release schedule?
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We're talking about Google right? You think they need a level of charity for a launch? I've read it all at this point.
The new releases this week baited me into business ultra subscription. Sadly it’s totally useless for gemini 3 cli and now also nano banana does not work. Just wow.
I bought a Pro subscription (or the lowest tier paid plan, whatever it's called), and the fact that I had to fill out a Google Form in order to request access to get Gemini 3 CLI is an absolute joke. I'm not even a developer, I'm a UX guy who just likes playing around with seeing how models deal with importing Figma screens and turn them into a working website. Their customer experience is shockingly awful, worse than OpenAI and Anthropic.
Oh man, there is so, so much pain here. Random example - if GOOGLE_GENAI_USE_VERTEXAI=true in your environment, woe betide you if you're trying to use gemini cli with an API key. Error messages don't match up with actual problems, you'll be told to log in using the cli auth for google, then you'll be told your API keys have no access.. It's just a huge mess. I still don't really know if I'm using a vertex API key or a non-vertex one, and I don't want to touch anything since I somehow got things running..
Anyway vai com dios, I know that there's a fundamental level of complexity deploying at google, and deploying globally, but it's just really hard compared to some competitors. Sadly, because the gemini series is excellent!
Just make it a VSCode plugin, I don't want to install a new IDE (which is just VSCode anyway) to use your product. It might be better than claude and chatgpt5.1 but not better enough to justify me re-doing all my IDE configs.
There is a Gemini VSCode plugin: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Google.g...
Any chance that this reflected to our company account instead of AI Studio?
We want to switch to Gemini from Claude (for agentic coding, chat UI, and any other employee-triggered scenarios) but the pricing model is a complete barrier: How do we pay for a monthly subscription with a capped price?
You launched Antigravity, which looks like an amazing product that could replace Claude Code, but do I know I will be able to pay for it in the same way I pay Claude, which is a simple pay per month subscription?
Please make sure that the new billing experience has support for billing limits and prepaid balance (to avoid unexpected charges)!
Lol. Since the GirlsGoneWild people pioneered the concept of automatically-recurring subscriptions, unexpected charges and difficult-to-cancel billing is the game. The best customer is always the one that pays but never uses the service ... and ideally has forgotten or lost access to the email address they used when signing up.
> or lost access to the email address they used when signing up.
Since Gmail controls access to tens of millions of people's email, I'm seeing potential for some cross-team synergy here!
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Hi, is your team planning on adding a spending cap? Last I tried, there was no reasonable way to do this. It keeps me away from your platform because runaway inference is a real risk for any app that calls LLMs programatically.
The fact that your team is worrying about billing is...worrying. You guys should just be focused on the product (which I love, thanks!)
Google has serious fragmentation problems, and really it seems like someone else with high rank should be enforcing (and have a team dedicated to) a centralized frictionless billing system for customers to use.
This is nice that you know about the issue and are working on it. I really appreciate all the new "Get api key" buttons across google ai products that already makes it much easier than setting up a cloud project and getting credentials json files.
But I do think it's a general problem with Google products that the solution is always to build a new one. There are already like 8 ways to use and pay for Google AI and that adds to the complexity of getting set up, so adding a new simpler better option might make that all worse instead of better
Maybe if the sign up process encouraged people to send videos (screen-side and user-side could be useful also), of their sign-up and usage experience, the teams responsible for user experience could make some real progress. I guess the question is, who cares, or who is responsible in the organization?
Can we get free Nano Banana in AI studio at least in super low resolution? For app building and testing purposes it will be fine and cheap enough for you to make it possible?
Hopefully the mobile version of AI Studio gets some improvement. There are some pretty awful UI bugs that make it really difficult to use in a mobile first manner.
Though I still managed to vibe code an app using nanobanana. Now I just need to sort API billing with it so I can actually use my app.
Dude. Let me give you my money. This isn’t rocket science. I don’t want anything to do with Google Cloud or Google Workspace or w/e it’s called now. Let me just subscribe to Gemini or Nano straight up.
This should be like 2 clicks.
I had the same reaction as them many months ago, the Google Cloud and Vertex AI stuff namespacing is a too messy. The different paths people might take to learning and trying to use the good new models needs properly mapping out and fixing so that the UX makes sense and actually works as they expect.
I had pretty much written off ever my credit card to Google, but a better billing experience and hard billing caps might change that.
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