Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration • Hacker News Board

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#191

Post by arjie » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 7:44 AM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #31

dannyobrien wrote: post #11

The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting…

I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things. I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk t…

That's just a disqualification process. Many products don't want a <$40k/annual customer because they're a net drain. For those, "talk to sales" is a way to qualify whether you're worth it as a customer. Very common in B2B and makes sense. Depends entirely on the product, of course.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#192

Post by specproc » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 7:44 AM UTC

harikb wrote: post #158

vel0city wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion dollars. The private company made it back in the first decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the parking as revenue compensation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicag…

Sometimes I think, it should be illegal for these government contracts to last beyond 5 years for exactly this reason. Who know what kind of deals are being made. Some administration could sign away the whole country on their last day.

It's straight up corruption, pure and simple. The UK is also full of this crap. The officials and executives who've facilitated and profited from this robbery should be jailed.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#193

Post by asim » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 7:45 AM UTC

dbuxton wrote: post #185

asim wrote: post #182

Unfortunately Google's problem is the product is dictated by the architecture of the APIs and this is an issue for anything they do. At one point long ago every Google product was disjointed and Larry Page told everyone they needed to be unified under a single theme and login. Then over time with the scale of the company you become entirely dependent on the current workflows. To work around it, all of a sudden there'…

> The unification and seamless workflow at that scale is painfully hard to achieve It does make you wonder, why not just be a lot smaller? It's not like most of these teams actually generate any revenue. It seems like a weird structural decision which maybe made sense when hoovering up available talent was its own defensive moat but now that strategy is no longer plausible should be rethought?

Two reasons. 1 - they print cash through Ads which means there's opportunity or desire to do more things, or even a feeling like you should or can. So new products emerge but also to try diversify the revenue stream. 2 - the continuous hiring and scale means churn, people get bored, they leave teams, they want to do something new, it all bifurcates. It keeps fragmenting and fragmenting until you have this multilayered fractal. It's how systems in nature operate so we shouldn't think corporation's will be any different. The only way to mitigate things like this is putting in places limits, rules and boundaries, but that also limits the upside and if you're a public company you can't do that. You have to grow grow grow and then cut cut cut and continue in that cycle forever or until you die.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#194

Post by journal » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 8:09 AM UTC

Won't be adding them then. Not worth the struggle from what I read here. You think it's plug-n-play just swap a model id and endpoint, nope, Chuck Testa.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#195

Post by srijanshukla18 » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 8:13 AM UTC

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

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#196

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 8:28 AM UTC

rozap wrote: post #177

I wasted several hours this week going around in the exact same circles. We have a billing account, but kept hitting a gemini quota. Fine. But then on the quota page, every quota said 0% usage. And our bill was like $5. Some docs said check AI studio, but then the "import project from google cloud to AI studio" button kept silently failing. This was a requests per minute quota, which was set at 15 (not a whole lot...…

For the last decade or so I get a second $0.85 monthly bill from google. Nobody at google knows why, but they recommend to leave it because who knows what could be disabled if I block those payments. Interesting detail here is that this is on a bank account that we stopped using in 2017, so the only reason we are keeping that account alive is for these stupid google payments. In the cloud environment there is an invoice for the amounts, but no way to change the billing info to our current account and also no way (not by us, not by google support) to figure out what these payments are actually for...

Calling it kafkaesque is giving it too much credit.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#197

Post by dvorka » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 8:28 AM UTC

This is so true! But the adventure doesn't end there. I have 2 billing accounts from the past when I was building projects on AppEngine. Annual exercise to keep them alive (even if no action is needed in the end) is of similar complexity. Why do I need these accounts? Because I want to use Google services for which I don't pay.

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#198

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 8:29 AM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #144

CamperBob2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a good walk anyway. There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking. If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to spend some quality time at your next city council meeting making yourself a royal PIA.

You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion dollars. The private company made it back in the first decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the parking as revenue compensation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicag…

So, the officials that signed that deal went to jail, right?

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#199

Post by YouAreWRONGtoo » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 8:30 AM UTC

ianberdin wrote: post #172

CSMastermind wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some other fun things you'll find: - The models perform differently when called via the API vs in the Gemini UI. - The Gemini API will randomly fail about 1% of the time, retry logic is basically mandatory. - API performance is heavily influenced by the whims of the Google we've observed spreads between 30 seconds and 4 minutes for the same query depending on how Google is feeling that day.

Even funnier, when Pro 3 answers to a previous message in my chat. Just making a duplicate answer with different words. Retry helps, but…

[dead]

Re: Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration

#200

Post by ksimukka » Thu, Dec 11, 2025, 8:32 AM UTC

Aperocky wrote: post #161

jiggawatts wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A purer, more perfect example of Conway’s Law has never been made more manifest than the myriad AWS consoles, each further partitioned by region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law And see especially “The Only Unbreakable Rule” by Molly Rocket: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY

In defense of AWS consoles, they are derivative of AWS APIs, as such they are really just a convenience layer that will only occasionally string 2+ AWS APIs together for convenience purposes that can be considered distinct feature on the console. That is wholly unlike the problem here where the console and API somehow behaves completely differently.

Along with the public APIs, An AWS service can also have Console APIs that are specifically for the console. These APIs do not have the same constraints as the public api.

(My team built the MediaLive service)