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Posted by speckx 1 day ago

Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration(ankursethi.com)
265 points | 110 commentspage 2
modeless 1 day ago|
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.
jwrallie 1 day ago|
Having moved from one country to another, I tripped all kinda of anti fraud systems and the only way out was to share my ID with every other company. It’s annoying but one common thing is that anti fraud systems seem to require humans in the loop, so it’s better to give up and get back to it next day.

The most annoying company I dealt with was Blizzard. I just wanted to play a game but it took days of back and forth, meanwhile I started to play something else and lost interest.

nl 1 day ago||
You literally cannot buy Antigravity with a non-personal Google account.

I read someone on here who is using Gemini via OpenRouter because it was the only way they could pay for it.

verdverm 1 day ago||
I'm using it fine through both aistudio and vertex ai, direct API calls

It's not at all hard generally, the core of this issue is centered around gemini-cli which is a hot pile of trash. The inability to get keys or account credentials (like why even use an API key, Google is top notch in auto-auth/WIF)

Insanity to me how gemini-cli is so bad at the basics with so many great Google packages in open source that handle all this transparently. All I need to do is have my gcloud authd with the right account/project. I sarcastically assume his is because they vibe coded gemini-cli and it implemented everything from scratch, missing out on reusing those great packages

nl 1 day ago||
> I'm using it

Do you mean Antigravity or Gemini?

If you mean Antigravity then.. how? Their docs say you can't do this.

If you mean Gemini then I personally haven't had issues but haven't tried to productionize a Gemini app. The OPs account seems to reflect other comments here.

verdverm 16 hours ago||
I already said how I'm calling Gemini

> direct API Calls

I suspect Antigravity to be a big flop like gemini-cli. They are so bad in this area they couldn't even write an extension or fork oss-code, instead spending $2B to pork an open source project with someone else's branding

inquirerGeneral 1 day ago||
[dead]
happyopossum 1 day ago||
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…
aerhardt 1 day ago||
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.

How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?!

throwup238 1 day ago|
> How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?!

Another rate limit in the wall.

SamvitJ 1 day ago||
Clever :)
rtaylorgarlock 1 day ago||
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.
mrj 1 day ago|
Oh no, this is just a Google thing. I've done the same verification bs for four different companies now, multiple times for each of them. I just keep an image of my license on my computer so I can upload it on demand. Google's payment verification is byzantine.

It'll trigger when you sign up.

It'll trigger if you create an Android developer account.

It'll trigger if you get a new phone.

It'll trigger if your card expires.

It'll trigger the month before your card expires. Why? Fuck you, that's why.

jpollock 1 day ago||
There is a lot of fraud with UPI, specifically social engineering to obtain UPI OTP codes.

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.

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.

https://support.stripe.com/questions/background-on-indian-go...

rvnx 1 day ago||
Setting up a limit of spending is even more difficult
movedx01 18 hours ago|
Is that even possible? Last time I checked it wasn't, while it was possible with OpenAI. Since that moment(early this year) - OpenAI has removed that option and their "Project budget" feature turned from being a hard limit into an email notification.
btown 1 day ago||
In case it's helpful to anyone, https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview is useful to know about.

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.

numlocked 18 hours ago|
(I work at OpenRouter) We add about 15ms of latency once the cache is warm (e.g. on subsequent requests) -- and if there are reliability problems, please let us know! OpenRouter should be more reliable as we will load balance and fall back between different Gemini endpoints.
btown 9 hours ago||
Is batch mode on the roadmap? As the frontier model providers start to think more and more about profitability, and prices/latencies rise as a result, I can see batching becoming more and more necessary for many use cases.

Would love to know we can build against the OpenAI batch API and (soon?) have a path towards being model-agnostic.

binarymax 1 day ago|
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.
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