[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

[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

[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?

[Leynos]

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

[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.

[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.