[obmelvin]

I don't understand the multiple posts / comments I've seen about this.

I google `gemini API key` and the first result* is this docs page: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key

That docs page has a link in the first primary section on the page. Sure, it could be a huge CTA, but this is a docs page, so it's kinda nice that it's not gone through a marketing make over.

* besides sponsored result for AI Studio

(Maybe I misunderstood and all the complaints are about billing. I don't remember having issues when I added my card to GCP in the past, but maybe I did)

[leopoldj]

As the article states, generating the key itself is easy. But getting credit and billing are the issues.

[knollimar]

I have it running and calling but it's not showing the usage and I set it up the day gemini 3 came out

[logankilpatrick]

You can check your usage, inclusive of Gemini 3 here: https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days just make sure you have the right project selected

[kro]

Agree, Google made it really easy here, compared to using service account certificates like with some of their other APIs.

[yawnxyz]

I've to this day never been able to pay for Gemini through the API, even though I've tried maybe 6-7 times

If you bring it up to Logan he'll just brush it off — I honestly don't know if they test these UX flows with their own personal accounts, or if something is buggy with my account.

[pants2]

This is my experience as well in my personal account, however at work given we were already paying for Google Cloud it was easy enough to connect a GCP account.

But somehow personally even though I'm a paying Google One subscriber and have a GCP billing account with a credit card, I get confusing errors when trying to use the Gemini API

[altbdoor]

To Logan's credit though, his team made and drove a lot of good improvements in AI studio and Gemini in general since the early days.

I feel his team is really hitting a wall now in terms of improvements, because it involves Google teams/products outside of their control, or require deep collaboration.

[bobviolier]

https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/1978897746921693572?s=20

[TheTaytay]

Yes, I get the impression he has been fighting this fight internally since the day he arrived. He can’t exactly talk about how infuriating it must be, but I look forward to his memoir.

[BoorishBears]

As the other comments pointed out, that's not covering billing...

But also the (theoretical) production platform for Gemini is Vertex AI, not AI Studio.

And until pretty recently using that took figuring out service accounts, and none of Google's docs would demonstrate production usage.

Instead they'd use the gcloud CLI to authenticate, and you'd have to figure out how each SDK consumed a credentials file.

-

Now there's "express mode" for Vertex which uses an API Key, so things are better, but the complaints were well earned.

At one point there were even features (like using a model you finetuned) that didn't work without gcloud depending on if you used Vertex or AI Studio: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/how-can-i-use-fine-tuned-mod...

[obmelvin]

I could've made my comment more clear. Definitely missing a statement along the lines of "and then after creating, you click 'set up billing' and link the accounts in 15 seconds"

I did edit my message to mention I had GCP billing set up already. I'm guessing that's one of the differences between those having trouble and those not.

[logankilpatrick]

AI Studio is meant to be the fast path from prompt to production, bringing billing fully into AI Studio in January will make this even faster! We have hundreds of thousands of paying customers in production using AI Studio right now.

[jiggawatts]

Every aspect is at least partially broken several times a day, and even when there isn't a temporary outage of something somewhere, there are nonsensical "blocks" for things that ought to just work.

I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse, just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am paying for and can use elsewhere.

Simultaneously, I'm trying to convince my company to pay for a corporate account of some sort so that I can use API keys with custom tools and run up a bill of potentially thousands of dollars that we can charge back to the customer.

My manager tried to follow the instructions and... followed the wrong ones. They all look the same. They all talk about "Gemini" and "Enterprise". He ended up signing up for Google's equivalent of Copilot for business use, not something that provides API keys to developers. Bzzt... start over from the beginning!

I did eventually find the instructions by (ironically) asking Gemini Pro, which provided the convenient 27 step process for signing up to three different services in a chain before you can do anything. Oh, and if any of them trigger any kind of heuristic, again, you get a hand in face telling you firmly and not-so-politely to take a hike.

PS: Azure's whatever-it-is-called-today is just as bad if not worse. We have a corporate account and can't access GPT 5 because... I dunno. We just can't. Not worthy enough for access to Sam Altman's baby, apparently.

[logankilpatrick]

> I've been using the AI Studio with my personal Workspace account. I can generate an API key. That worked for a while, but now Gemini CLI won't accept it. Why? No clue. It just says that I'm "not allowed" to use Gemini Pro 3 with the CLI tool. No reason given, no recourse, just a hand in your face flatly rejecting access to something I am paying for and can use elsewhere.

Passing along this feedback to the CLI team, no clue why this would be the case.

[verdverm]

Most of them are correlating gemini-cli experience (trash) with the broader access to Gemini via studio or cloud (not at all a problem)

[amluto]

> Gemini via studio

Excuse me? If you mean AI Studio, are you talking about the product where you can’t even switch which logged in account you’re using without agreeing to its terms under whatever random account it selected, where the ability to turn off training on your data does not obviously exist, and where it’s extremely unclear how an organization is supposed to pay for it?

[rezonant]

Yes, much like admin.google.com (the GSuite admin interface), which goes ahead and tries to two-factor your personal GMail account every single time you load it instead of asking you which of the actual GSuite accounts you're signed into you'd like to use...

[amluto]

I love how the two factor screen has no obvious way to tell it that you want a different account.

Hint: you can often avoid some of this mess by adding the authuser=user@domain to the URL.

[verdverm]

Yeah, with multiple chrome profiles, you have to be mindful of which one you last had focused before clicking a link from an external application (i.e. tailscale), so that it opens the new tab in the right instance so the account(s) you use in it are available

Def use multiple chrome profiles if you aren't. You can color code them to make visual identification a breeze

[rezonant]

I'm aware of multiple Chrome profiles and I do not want to use them. Google should simply make their account switching consistent across their apps and work sensibly in these corner cases.

[verdverm]

"simply" is doing a lot of work, profiles is the outcome of addressing the problems you are talking about. Many people enjoy them and find them useful. Why are you against using them?

[andoando]

I always have a buggy ass hell experience with having multiple google accounts pretty much across all their services. I've been wondering if its just me or how the hell this is normal.

[Marsymars]

I long ago concluded that trying to mix multiple google (or MS) accounts in the same browser profile is a path to madness.

[verdverm]

seriously, just use different chrome profiles, but part of the issue is that they are so interwoven you pretty much have to do this

[verdverm]

Don't get me wrong, aistudio is pretty bad and full of issues, but getting an apikey was not hard or an issue itself. Using any auth method besides personal account oauth with gemini-cli never worked for me after hours of trying

[Leynos]

They could always just use OpenCoder, Crush or Goose with OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3-pro-preview)

[verdverm]

Google has the ADK project, which is really good.

Python is the primary implementation, Java is there, Go is relatively new and aiming for parity. They could have contributed the Typescript implementation and built on common, solid foundation, but alas, the hydra's heads are not communicating well

These other "frameworks" are (1) built by people who need to sell something, so they are often tied to their current thinking and paid features (2) sit at the wrong level. ADK gives me building blocks for generalized agents, whereas most of these frameworks are tied to coding and some peculiarities you see there (like forcing you to deal with studio, no thanks). They also have too much abstraction and I want to be able to control the lower level knobs and levers

ADK is the closest to what I've been looking for, an analog to kubernetes in the agentic space. Deal with the bs, give me great abstractions and building blocks to set me free. So many of the other frameworks want to box you into how they do things, today, given current understanding. ADK is minimal and easy to adjust as we learn things

[quleap]

ADK is anything but minimal. It indeed has too much abstraction. It's certainly designed to promote Google's own services. If you are looking for lightweight frameworks, consider smolagents or Pydantic AI. Even OpenAI Agents SDK is simpler. LangChain/LangGraph are the epitome of incompetent designs.

[FeepingCreature]

openrouter just gives you prompt in, result out in standard openai api format.

[verdverm]

These projects are all a level above open router, they call the same standard APIs, or even custom ones and manage the translation. They do a lot more as well

ADK has an option to use litellm (openrouter alternative), among many options

https://google.github.io/adk-docs/agents/models/#using-cloud...

[arthurfirst]

I have a claude max subscription and a gemini pro sub and I exclusively use them on the cli. When I run out of claude max each week I switch over to gemini and the results have been pretty impressive -- I did not want to like it but credit where credit is due to google.

Like the OP others I didn't use the API for gemini and it was not obvious how to do that -- that said it's not cost effective to develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why you would? Sure you need API for any applications with built-in LLM features, but not for developing in the LLM assisted CLI tools.

I think the issue with cli tools for many is you need to be competent with cli like a an actual nix user not Mac first user etc. Personally I have over 30 years of daily shell use and a sysadmin and developer. I started with korn and csh and then every one you can think of since.

For me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible. To say nothing of the physical aliments associated with excessive mousing.

Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights me the whole time.

[verdverm]

> it's not cost effective to develop without a Sub vs on API pay-as-you-go, so i do no know why you would

My spend is lower, so I conclude otherwise

> I think the issue with cli tools for many is...

Came from that world, vim, nvim, my dev box is remote, homelab

The issue is not that it is a CLI, it's that you are trying to develop software through the limited portal of a CLI. How do you look at multiple files at the same time? How do you scroll through that file

1. You cannot through a tool like gemini-cli

2. You are using another tool to look at files / diffs

3. You aren't looking at the code and vibe coding your way to future regret

> or me any sort of a GUI slows me down so much it's not feasible.

vim is a "gui" (tui), vs code has keyboard shortcuts, associating GUI with mouse work

> Having put approaching thousands of hours working with LLM coding tools so far, for me claude-code is the best, gemini is very close and might have a better interface, and codex is unusable and fights me the whole time.

Anecdotal "vibe" opinions are not useful. We need to do some real evals because people are telling stories like they do about their stock wins, i.e. they don't tell you about the losses.

Thousands of hours sounds like your into the vibe coding / churning / outsourcing paradigm. There are better ways to leverage these tools. Also, if you have 1000+ hours of LLM time, how have you not gone below the prepackaged experience Big AI is selling you?

[logankilpatrick]

Added a big button on: https://googledevai.devsite.corp.google.com/gemini-api/docs/... to make this more clear

[politelemon]

I did this same thing and this was my first result too. I am just not seeing how the author ended up where they did, unless knowing how to use Google search is not a core skill.

[mediaman]

Read the full post. Partway down you will see they agree with you that getting an API key is not hard.

Paying is hard. And it is confusing how to set it up: you have to create a Vertex billing account and go through a cumbersome process to then connect your AIStudio to it and bring over a "project" which then disconnects all the time and which you have to re-select to use Nano Banana Pro or Gemini 3. It's a very bad process.

It's easy to miss this because they are very generous with the free tier, but Gemini 3 is not free.

[malfist]

I did notice in their post instead of searching for answers, they asked Gemini how to do things, and when that didn't work, they asked Claude.

I often see coworkers offload their work of critical thinking to an AI to give them answers instead doing the grunt work nessecary to find their answers on their own.

[dugidugout]

This rhetoric worries me. If you insist on degrading others at least fix it to something like:

> [They seemingly] can't think on their own without an AI [moderating]

They _literally_ can think on their own, and they _literally_ did think up a handful of prompts.

A more constructive way to make what I assume to be your point would be highlighting why this shift is meaningful and leaving the appeal to ego for yourself.

[malfist]

I agree with your assessment, I am in the wrong here. It's easy to be extra judgmental to anonymous figures on a blog you'll never meet. Thank you for reminding me to give people the benefit of doubt and not jump to worst case assumptions.

I've edited my post to be more charitable

[ipaddr]

There is some truth in that statement.

Low energy afternoons you might be able to come up with a prompt but not the actual solution.

There are people offloading all thoughts into prompts instead of doing the research themselves and some have reached a point where they lost the ability to do something because of over AI use.