Amazon has Q, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot…

Names that mean everything, nothing or something based on what website you land or what sales pipeline you are on.

It seems like they don't want to make money out of it right now and it was mostly a show off to prove they can do it. That, or massive incompetence.

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.

A while back it took me around ~20 minutes to figure out how to subscribe to Gemini CLI and when done I couldn't even verify within the CLI …

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...

Not being able to sign up for stuff is in the same league as being perpetually low on disk space.

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

ahah I'm really vibing with this post, I went through the same idea as the OP - wanted to try gemini 3 and/or nano banana - and as soon as I was thrown into the billing management panel of Google Cloud and their whole linking process I bailed.

is a land min in that UI interface, you never know what you enabled/disabled and get fked over by charges that came out of left field, or why it doesn't work. google continues to be a UX shit show