Posted by speckx 1 day ago
That said, while setting up the Gemini API through AI Studio is remarkably straightforward for small side projects, transitioning to production with proper billing requires navigating the labyrinth that is Google Cloud Console. The contrast between AI Studio's simplicity and the complexity of production billing setup is jarring, it's easy to miss critical settings when you're trying to figure out where everything is.
Variable costs are great, scale with the business; but visibility is a big (intentional?) challenge.
- Google cloud is setup for big organizations. Not for individuals. All cloud providers are pretty much confusing in a similar way. - India has specific rules re cybersecurity and financial regulations that Google has to comply. (mandatory id verification and kyc compliance). Others have asked for an id check too.
From what confused me, if OP wanted to use a model, the easier way would have been to pay cursor/windsurf etc. and select that model. Usually that is how people try out a new model. Trying out a specific way means going through the norms every country imposes, and bloat in case of legacy products.
AWS and Azure have come up with their own models. If their future versions hit close to sota and people want to use it, many would end up in a similar loop (and woudl be easier to just use it from the aggregators).
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.
I only went through it because I got once 300 USD for free to spend on my Google Workspace account I/my business owns.
OpenAI API usage is so much easier.
Btw Google: Fix Google Console API usage dashboard... why is there a delay of 2+ days? Why cannot I see (and block!) the usage of the current day?
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...
The author apparently found himself on a much more difficult path, one designed for enterprises who are already on google cloud, already have billing set up, etc. The fact that an individuals experience with an enterprise platform isn't great is predictable... That's why there are individual/consumer plans for this stuff.
Of course I first had to faff about adding the company credit card, which took five tries and two days. Then I found I had to create the appropriate resource group, before I could set up a service. Fair enough, it might make sense later to have costs divided up like that. After I got the resource group, I then thought to start simple and spin up a single VM.
This gave me an error message saying that my request exceeded the quota. Which quota? The built-in copilot in Azure chewed on the raw error in its JSONness, and helpfully told me I could find the Azure quota page by searching for it in the Azure portal.
Once I entered the quota page, I was greeted with a message saying that I was now in the new quota experience in public preview mode. After many clicks I found the appropriate line for the desired VM SKU in the desired region, where it said I had used 0 of the quota of 30. So why didn't it work? I tried to request an increased quota, just in case. That process spent five minutes on "please wait", then failed with a generic error message.
At that point I started googling around, and eventually in some forum thread I found the missing piece: my resource group did not yet have a subscription. After more faffing about, I got a subscription associated with my resource group. What is a subscription, you ask, and what is the relation between a tenant, a subscription and a resource group? I haven't the foggiest, but I've clicked enough buttons to make the errors go away. Por ahora.
I remember multiple waiting periods, and multiple requirements to cross spend thresholds to increase in tiers. I remember at one point spamming the OpenAI API with garbage just to consume credits in order to get to the next tier to increase rate limits.
More recently (couple months ago) I tried using a 3rd party client for ChatGPT which needed a OpenAI API key. I gave up after 20 mins.
The limits are annoying.