Comment by jjcm
3 days ago
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.
Huh. I'm not storing the Google search results, and my local supplementary index is built from my own crawling, not from URLs from Google searches. But if re-ranking is regarded as processing & analyzing, then I'll remove the Google API calls now (and... done).
Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia and EU Search Perspective have certainly been much friendlier to deal with.
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.
[flagged]
Sergey's out spending $100 million to lobby against the billionaire tax in California. Lest his net worth shrink from roughly $250 billion to $237 billion. Can't become a pleb now! [0]
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/10/google-co-founder-sergey-b...
13 replies →
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.
I signed up for AWS (SES) recently for the first time and find their whole thing confusing as heck too. Signed into the wrong region and they pretend they don't even know who I am.
It was 3 clicks because you knew where to look for.
A pet peeve of mine is that Google doesn't let you search all the options like Apple or Microsoft E.g., I have flashbacks to trying to turn off or on bells in Google Home. A simple search bar would help people trying find API keys, etc.
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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