Comment by krat0sprakhar
3 days ago
Can you help me understand how it is hard to get an API key from Google? You just head on over to http://aistudio.google.com/api-keys and create a key... not any different from platform.openai.com?
Disclaimer: I work in Google so it might be that this link is not publicly well known
Disclaimer that I haven't tried this since January, so things may have changed in the last 7mo, but this was my experience at that time: https://x.com/pwnies/status/2010523020629274723
At a high level though, as a rule of thumb Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first, and at a human scale second. For other companies it's the opposite. Generally what that means is the first experience you get with a Google product will route you through 8 different dashboards to set up ACLs before you've hired your 2nd employee.
Similar experience here, for what it's worth, though I didn't get as far as you. I basically just stopped and didn't bother - it was easier to go through OpenRouter than spend more energy on it.
Also:
> Google assumes that they're serving companies at Google scale first
So much this. I'm currently grandfathered in until the end of the year on Google's Search API, but the $35,000 they want to continue usage of my < 1000 personal searches per month, not going to happen. It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google.
It's not an assumption that the customer is Google scale that led the $35k monthly price point. It was that you (and many others like you) are breaking the terms of service (which state you are not supposed to store, process or analyze the search results). It was an API built for a different era, that doesn't really exist anymore.
> It has honestly been easier to use Anthropic to help me build my own search index & crawling infrastructure than deal with Google.
That's great to hear! FWIW I agree with you that it's harder for independent professionals to get started on Google dev services than others, but the Search API is not developer service and was never intended to be.
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The current move to force the usage of their AI api from postpay to prepay is also another example. (At least it’s going to give me the last incentive to move to cheaper api)
> they're serving companies at Google scale first
I think that's actually a very interesting insight that would be helpful for PMs on GCloud to take note of. As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco, forcing (I assume most) of their users into a arduous process of removing components they don't need.
Google AI Studio is one of Google's solutions to this problem, but in typical Google fashion, it's bolted-on without any clear connection in the ecosystem. If you're also using GCloud, it's hard to remember it's even there.
OpenAI's platform, by contrast, is streamlined, easy to use. With Google, I feel like I need to wade through the documentation first before even using the darn thing.
This is a meme within Google already. People even complain that some internal tools assume you're serving a billion users when you just want to make a little webserver. But same with GCP.
> As a single founder, setting up Google Cloud, it's like they start out by assuming you're bigco
My impression of anything enterprise (big or small) related to Google is that they just don't care / value solving it.
Which is sad, because "How does an enterprise customer pay for X?" is a non-trivial and incredibly important UX problem.
They have great technical solutions, but these are hamstrung by a frankly amateur understanding of how companies (startups to Fortune 500s) need to sign up, pay for, and track things.
From an outside perspective, one of the biggest gaps seems to be that internal Google product teams don't have to dogfood the full GCP et al. project/org experience. They get prebuilt billing structures (or just get to avoid them with internal cross-billing).
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If I could waive a magic wand, Google would appoint an "Enterprise Czar", reporting directly to Pichai, who is a non-technical, retired founder / CEO.
That person would have one job: try to sign up, run (their team), and budget strategic Google initiatives (like AI) as a blind external party.
They would then deliver continuous reports to Pichai about how hard / easy this is.
Because potential Google customers don't give a shit if it's this internal team or that internal team's responsibility for integrating New Product X into GCP billing.
They care that the experience is terrible, filled with friction, and often flat out doesn't work.
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FWIW I definitely did not not need to do anything like that to generate a key via AI Studio. It was like three clicks to get the free tier key, later on enabling billing was a few more plus typing in credit card info.
yeah, "enabling billing" is a whole other ordeal. Like it all makes sense, it's not that hard, it's just a lot of extra clicks where the competition doesn't require that. You can blow off this feedback as the user whining, but it's real friction and the competition doesn't have that, so users are going to go elsewhere if they can.
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It was 3 clicks because you knew where to look for.
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Don't forget your account getting flagged for review, so you get to wait an extra 24 hours for no reason.
This happened to me once when I was setting up some virtual servers for a startup.
I wanted a typical dev/qa/prod with medium specced boxes.
I was denied for quota, with an esoteric process for review.
I'd just made a case for deploying to GCP over AWD so got a bit of egg on my face. Went over and had it done on AWS in a few minutes.
A couple days later, the Google product team contacted me. I told them what happened.
It got escalated, and I ended up on a call with like 5 or 6 people from Google, some very senior. I told them what happened.
They made very concerned sounding noises and told me how this was a product failure on their part, how they'd get it corrected, etc... and they'd fixed my account so I could now make the machines. Of course, I was already deployed to AWS at that point.
That company grew and ended up with a pretty big cloud spend eventually. Google totally missed it.
I was at a new startup a few years later and decided to deploy to GCP.
Denied for quota.
Literally just built a custom Adsense dashboard based on not integrating with Google's APIs. Every couple days I export the 2 reports I need from their UI and save them to a folder; it's automated from there and integrates with my clients' website - thats good enough - even if its not real time its a small price to pay for not having to navigate (and maintain) Google's API madness. Like you said 8 different dashboards before you get what you need (and frontier LLMs cant help here), and even then you are forced to build some elaborate Oauth app instead of just getting a simple API key that you can paste in a .env file
expertise at navigating accidental complexity can easily be mistaken for engineering expertise.
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Personally I went to https://console.cloud.google.com since I already had some GCP projects. Then I searched for Gemini API Key. It brought me to https://console.cloud.google.com/agent-platform/studio/setti.... Then, there was a banner saying "Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities." Then, I did that, which took quite a while (minutes). Finally, I was able to see the way to create an API key.
The fact that there's two ways to get keys is also very confusing.
+1 GCP can be confusing - I totally get that.
Even if you have GCP projects, I'd still recommend the AI studio UI - easier to figure out. Also, you can easily see the free tier in AI studio and just use your API key from there.
Yes I will look into it now but there’s no cross reference from GCP, and why are there two ways? And why did the GCP way require all these APIs enabled while AI studio didn’t?
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Luckily, an AI solves this.
But ironically my experience is that Codex/Claude navigate GCP better than Gemini.
> Enable APIs to access full platform capabilities
Isn’t this the insecure thing that gives all your Google API keys access to Gemini, even those that were intended to be semi public (eg maps API keys embedded in websites or apps)
You need to create a Google Cloud project to create an api key and when you try to create one you very often get error messages like:
“Failed to create project, The request is suspicious. Please try again” or “ You do not have permission to create a key in this project”. You can then navigate multiple screens in GCP to make it work but it’s a hassle compared to any other provider (OAI/Ant/OpenRouter or any of the Chinese labs).
I didn't have that issue back when I originally created my API keys a couple years ago. Just out of curiosity I switched to a different Google account that had never interacted with AI Studio and never used Google Cloud console.
It was literally two clicks, and didn't even leave the page: the dialog asked to create a project and type in a name, I did that, clicked submit and then it was selected as the default project. One more click and I had the free tier API key.
Not saying you didn't have that experience at the time, but personally I have had zero issues with AI Studio and consider it the most dead simple/fastest dev dashboard to get started compared to the others like OpenAI/Anthropic (thanks to Google's free tier that lets you skip billing setup annoyances just to play around with Gemini).
Despite what HN threads (that are also frequently confused and talking about GCP instead) portray as universal/widespread issues or the process being complex and time consuming somehow.
Last time I used the AI studio free tier it was limited to one or two requests, effectively useless. I think people are complaining its too hard to set up a paid API key (no reason you should make paying customers spend more than a few clicks and a minute of their time to pay you)
We have probably 10+ years old account with Google cloud etc. We recently had a production deployment, I went over to AI studio to get new keys and it kept failing saying "Failed to generate API key, The request is suspicious. Please try again" - It was through my standard browser, same geo-ip. And it just worked after 2 days.
> Can you help me understand how it is hard to get an API key from Google?
Using Google products in general is an effing nightmare as soon as you have to give them money.
The one thing you want in a business is to remove friction when people want to give you money, a concept Google has never been able to understand.
> Using Google products in general is an effing nightmare as soon as you have to give them money
Spending money via Google Pay on Android is extremely easy, Google does know how to accept customer's money (in the consumer space)
Google if you're reading this, it does not mean I do not want limits on spending
Maybe things have changed but it was a big mess trying to getting an API key from Google as an individual a few years ago. Way too much conflicting documentation.
Eventually I gave up and run a few hundred million tokens (edit a few billion) through openrouter.ai using Gemini Flash 1.5 to Flash 2.5
Every since price increases on Flash 3.0 I've stopped using Gemini, too expensive for basic classification, sentiment detection, ocr etc.
As other posters said Google assumes you are some bigcorp trying to use their products. The Vertex versus AI studio confusion did not help.
I tried to use Gemini for one of my projects a month ago. Immediately after signing up and paying for credits, I got an email saying, “Action required: your billing account {redacted} is past due or has invalid payment information.” I have no idea why it says this. My credit card on file works. My balance updated with a new amount from that card. 11 days later, my account was terminated. I still don’t understand what went wrong or how to fix it.
I do pay for OpenAI, Anthropic, and ElevenLabs keys.
Have you tried using the free tier in https://aistudio.google.com/api-keys? Sorry for your billing issues - these can be super annoying to resolve
I have a Google account that I had tied to a domain I originally purchased from google (when they had the .dev offerings), and now that it's been purchased by square space my ability to use AI through that account is in a bizarre state. Even my free gmail account has more AI offerings, and I'm not allowed to pay for improved AI offerings on my custom domain & google workspace account.
I know this is probably a pretty small edge case, but it is a bit frustrating. Any other provider lets you sign up with an email and give them a payment processor/card, but because google wants me to only use their unified workspace for signing up, I'm completely locked out now.
it worked for me okay when I needed it for myself in my personal account. But when I tried setup this for a company I spent almost a day solving lot of small puzzles in GCE like how to tell CEO that he have to connect billing account created for other purposes (and he not even remember at time that it exist) to new project and all other things that others talking about.
As someone who has been running Gemini models in production for a year, recently (last 2 months), I have been actively moving away from it.
The primary reason for me has been that Google autonomously decides to downgrade usage tiers and then upgrade them again - and does this incorrectly.
Over the last week itself, in the span of two days, our account for first downgraded and then upgraded. This is despite matching the criteria to remain at the tier we operate at throughout.
Google Support (when you finally get to a human) has accepted that these are potentially bugs, but the first time it happened, we were rate limited so severely for ~4 hours that I find it really difficult to continue trusting Google.
Simple question - can i use Gemini 3.7 flash with a subscription in my own harness and not in agy client ? You're from Google so the question.
By the way - I love Gemini's personality . it's phenomenal to work with
The reason i want my own harness - is the custom tools that i provide vs the low tier tools that come with the custom harnesses.
You'll would really benefit , if we could use Gemini in our own harness and not be forced to use it via agy . i've tried using gemini to circumvent - but not been successful.
If you see this - please reply here
On top of being the hardest website to navigate, Google console a) doesn't have real time billing (!) b) doesn't allow you to set a budget limit.
Sorry but it's not worth waking up with a 100k$ bill, fix your platform first.
Oh it’s worse than that. There are places where you CAN set a limit. This seems great until you are at the center of a huge traffic spike because of good pr and so you try to change it to a larger number only to be told you need to wait 24 hours for the setting to change.
Biggest traffic day of the decade and our site was down because of google.
You prepay for tokens exactly like the OpenAI/Anthropic dev dashboards when using AI Studio, which the link above is pointing to not GCP, also there are project specific spend caps now.
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#spend-caps
You are right; last time I tried it I used the cloud console as I needed gemini with the places tool included. However:
"Experimental: The feature is experimental and limited in scope. You are subject to overages for around a 10 minute latency period."
Why in 2026 can't Google do a database lookup in real time? This is so ridiculous.
Spend caps can now be set https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...
GCP/vertex is a maze
Same experience. It took minutes to find the API key from the console.
Now following up with Google support team without luck to find the logs. Prompts send to the model and the responses including the thinking was available in the ai studio. But it’s unclear where to find the same in console.
To make matters worse there is vertex api and rebranded to Gemini something and making it very confusing.
That is easy but I’ve also found myself in account setup dashboards that were obviously geared toward enterprise trying to set up access to tinker with something AI related. It might have been TTS but it’s been a little while and I can’t quite remember.
The problem is that this doesn’t work for enterprise. The rate limits of that is super low. Then you need to migrate to Vertex and that is just a pain. Who ever thought of using JSON instead of an api key…
i use gemini api in the third-party platform like openrouter and evolink.ai , easier to get key and manage my bill
I even know the link existed but forgot what it was specifically and couldn’t remember what AI* property it was offered under and it took me a long time to figure it out.
I haven’t tried in about a year, but I could never do any meaningful work outside 1P Google apps (antigravity) due to such fast throttling.
I just asked Gemini how to do it and that's exactly what it sent me. Was up and running in a few minutes.
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