This reminds me of the ”I just want to serve 5 terabytes” thing

Google does not want your money, they don’t know how to count so low

Yea, I went through this exact fiasco a few months ago trying to do the same thing. Or rather, I went through the first two-thirds of it and then gave up.

I think they are trying too much to have you jump on GCP. Having a simpler UI with a credit limit (maybe even at a different rate) would actually get more people to use it imo.

As a former employee, the engineering culture at Google gives me old-school hacker vibes, so users are very much expected to “figure it out” and that’s somewhat accepted (and I say this with fond memories). It’s no surprise the company struggles with good UX.

Just a note that you can use opencode with their API gateway (they call it "zen") to get access to all the most popular models using a single account, including gemini. (Although this wouldn't have helped the author, since they wanted to try the Gemini CLI specifically).

I had even worse experience with Microsoft Azure. In the middle of the path I realized a third-party sales “ultra real Microsoft support, certified” is dealing with me in order to sell me overpriced options.

I am from India, Have had similar experience. After billing they mentioned models which ai was looking were not launched in india ( Veo3 and nano banana )

I use replicate, fal for all api and for LLM openrouter

Yes, tried countless hours and even reached out to google billing support. Doesn't accept UPI or card, runs into an error with both.

Have you looked at getting an openai api key for gpt5? you have to do selfie-ID verification...

I had a similar experience with GCP / Google Workspace. It's just bad experience.