Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

Posted by speckx 1 day ago

Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration(ankursethi.com)

812 points | 320 commentspage 4

jwr 1 day ago|

I also tried to make Gemini work with opencode and after spending about an hour in various panels, billing settings, setting up access groups, project groups, and other paraphernalia, gave up. There is Google Cloud, Vertex AI, Oauth which works or does not depending on whatever, all the "groups" and other crap I don't need, overall I just failed.

Claude code just works.

bobjordan 1 day ago||

I went through similar song and dance using a paid Gemini code assist “standard” level subscription. I finally got Gemini 3 working in my terminal in my repository. I assigned it a task that Claude code Opus 4.5 would quickly knock out, and Gemini 3 did a reasonably similar job. I had opus 4.5 evaluate the work and it was complimentary of Gemini 3S work. Then I check the usage and I’d used 10% of the daily token usage limit, about 1.5M tokens on that one task. So I can only get about 10 tasks before I’m rate limited. Meanwhile with Claude code $200 max plan, I can run 10 of those same caliber of tasks in parallel, even with opus 4.5 model, and barely register the usage meter. The only thing the Gemini code assist “standard” plan will be good for with these limits are just double checking the plans that opus 4.5 makes. Until the usage limits are increased, it’s pretty useless compared to Claude code max plan. But there doesn’t seem to be any similar plan offering from Google.

phromo 1 day ago||

I had a similar experience. However I gave up before being able to pay. Repeated the story two or three times. This was work for a medium sized Corp and in the end we didn't even give gemini a chance because of this (performance was sufficiently good with competing providers) . Really hope they up their UX.

arjunchint 14 hours ago||

We built an AI Web Agent on top of Gemini.

We actually created shortcut for the agent itself to go to AI Studio, create API key, and configure itself haha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6ywfLrG_W8

axi0m 1 day ago||

Gosh, this story resonates so much with me... I had the exact same experience few days ago, desperately trying to get a small agent prototype working for a quick demo. I spent an good hour dealing with that pile of nonsense. Online payments and accounts management have been mastered for 20 years now, why do we still have to endure such things? It just kills me. The same goes with Azure (and all MS online-related services), if not even worse.

Simplita 1 day ago||

I thought it was just me. The onboarding experience feels unintentionally hostile for new developers.

intothemild 1 day ago||

I like using Gemini for general stuff,

I have that Gemini AI plan thing, and it's great. But I absolutely will not plug my credit card into Google cloud services, no way.. I know I can put guardrails up, but I just am terrified that I'll get a gigantic bill that I cannot afford.

Nope sorry no way. I want a simple $X per month sub.

Claude gives me that. Which is why Claude wins.

ra 1 day ago|

That's fine but you're missing out, and you're most likely paying waay more than you need to.

ipaddr 1 day ago||

Missing out on nothing

odie5533 1 day ago||

The difficult process is on purpose. You're too small. You're just going to waste their customer support resources and only give them maybe a couple hundred dollars. They're hoping you give up and go away.

mijoharas 1 day ago|

We're a reasonably sized company. Recently we needed to change our google cloud payment details.

Finance users had changed in the meantime, so I navigate and create an iam user, ok, billing administrator is a thing, great.

Oh, they said it didn't work? alright, there seems to be a project billing administrator as well as an organisation billing administrator? weird, ok let's try that.

Hmm... it still didn't work? let's look around a little more. Ok, within the billing account (that they're a billing administrator to) and within the organisation (that they're a billing administrator to) there is a tab called "payment users". This seems to be _separate_ from their IAM users, and the person needs to be added there (as well as? instead of? who knows) and _then_ they can change the card details.

UX is especially crap here (for google cloud billing).

Let's not even get started on the whole vertex vs. aistudio stuff. Also when one of the gemini's came out their python library worked while their curl docs, and their ruby client didn't so we had to read the source of the python library to figure out what it actually did under the hood to test it out. (this was a while ago, I think they might've gotten better since but the documentation/devex was really bad at at the time)

krisgenre 1 day ago||

Maybe they want more free users to better train their models and don't care about the money (which they already have in plenty?).

In the grand scheme of things, paid users are minuscule. They are probably delighted because of all the free users.

runtimepanic 1 day ago|

The experience feels fragmented because Google has multiple overlapping developer consoles and product boundaries. Gemini just exposes that underlying fragmentation more clearly than other APIs.

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