[risyachka]

We are talking here about the most basic things- nothing AI related. Basic billing. The fact that it is not working says a lot about the future of the product and company culture in general (obviously they are not product-oriented)

[thehappypm]

There’s nothing basic about billing.

[1dom]

Given how many paid offerings Google has, and the complexity and nuance to some of those offering (e.g. AdSense) I am pretty surprised that Google don't have a functioning drop in solution for billing across the company.

If they do, it's failing here. The idea of a penny pinching megacorp like Google failing technically even in the penny pinching arena is a surprise to me.

[adrianN]

It is basic in the sense that it is difficult to run a business where billing doesn’t work. It’s not basic in the „easy“ sense.

[risyachka]

I mean this problem has been solved. Nothing new to it. You just take a few weeks and implement it properly. No surprises will come up.

[atonse]

Even though my post complaining about google's billing and incoherent mess got so many upvotes, I'll be the first to say that there is nothing basic about "give me money".

Apart from the fact that what happens to the money when it gets to google (putting it in the right accounts, in the right business, categorizing it, etc), it changes depending on who you're ASKING for money.

1. Getting money from an individual is easy. Here's a credit card page.

2. Getting money from a small business is slightly more complicated. You may already have an existing subscription (google workspaces), just attach to it.

3. As your customers get bigger, it gets more squishy. Then you have enterprise agreements, where it becomes a whole big mess. There are special prices, volume discounts, all that stuff. And then invoice billing.

The point is that yes, we all agree that getting someone to plop down a credit card is easy. Which is why Anthropic and OpenAI (who didn't have 20 years of enterprise billing bloat) were able to start with the simplest use case and work their way slowly up.

But I AM sensitive to how hard this is for companies as large and varied as Google or MS. Remember the famous Bill Gates email where even he couldn't figure out how to download something from Microsoft's website.

It's just that they are also LARGE companies, they have the resources to solve these problems, just don't seem to have the strong leadership to bop everyone on the head until they make the billing simple.

And my guess is also that consumers are such a small part of how they're making money (you best believe that these models are probably beautifully integrated into the cloud accounts so you can start paying them from day one).

[AJ007]

My first thought was this is the whole thing about managers at Google trying to get employees under other managers fired and their own reports promoted -- but it feels too similar to how fucked up all the account and billing stuff is at Microsoft. This is what happens when you try to "fix" something by layering on more complexity and exceptions.

From past experience, the advertising side of the business was very clear with accounts and billing. GCP was a whole other story. The entire thing was poorly designed, very confusing, a total mess. You really needed some justification to be using it over almost everything else (like some Google service which had to go through GCP.) It's kind of like an anti-sales team where you buy one thing because you have to and know you never want to touch anything from the brand ever again.

[logankilpatrick]

We made the bet 2 years ago to build AI Studio on top of the Google Cloud infra. One of the real challenges is that Google is extremely global, we support devs in hundreds of countries with dozens of different billing methods and the like. I wish the problem space was simple but on the first day I joined Google we kicked off the efforts to make sure we could bring billing into AI Studio, so January cannot come soon enough : )