Getting a Gemini API Key Is an Exercise in Frustration
Key topics
Frustration is brewing among developers trying to get their hands on a Gemini API key, with many echoing the sentiment that Google's convoluted process is a major turn-off. Commenters shared their own horror stories, from getting bogged down in billing setup to hitting roadblocks due to ridiculously low request limits. The consensus is that Google's focus on enterprise billing is alienating individual developers, who are the ones most likely to evangelize their products. As one commenter quipped, Google seems to be missing the memo that "individuals trying it out is how they get their work and recommend this stuff."
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
1h
Peak period
143
Day 1
Avg / period
26.7
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 10, 2025 at 3:29 PM EST
24 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 10, 2025 at 4:49 PM EST
1h after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
143 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 20, 2025 at 2:11 PM EST
14 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
My fucking god, how has Google not flagged the failure of onboarding devs like Claude / Codex?
3 days ago I was literally thinking, I want to throw 20$ to try out Gemini alongside my Claude and Codex subs.
It took me a few minutes to realize its just not worth my time to figure out how.
Holy Crap, I got about 45 minutes into setting up billing and just gave up and un-did everything.
Hint: If you want to put a spending Limit on your google cloud account, its not trivial.
I will say that Stability AI is similar to Claude, they will just let you buy credits and hit an API.
Google does not want your money, they don’t know how to count so low
https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI (2010)
Googlers tend to exist in an isolated bubble. In the corporate world, Azure is the default and they have Azure OpenAI. Why would someone bother with Gemini? Unless the devs at companies have a good experience with it of course.
Googlers are awesome/mean well, if only enough of them lurked here :)
I actually do agree that the service known as Vercel is quite decent. But I don't consider that to be on the development side of things. It's done well because it is geared towards business folks who are paying the bills.
Those writing code on top of the development solutions produced by the company known as Vercel have been completely forsaken. The curse of not being in the profit centre, I suppose.
- How builds and deploys are configured
- The simple aspect of connecting a GitHub repo and you get auto deploys
- Auto creating branch environments that make testing as easy as a new link
- Just configuring users and permissions and not seeing IAM anywhere is a huge win
My billing admins don't do any of this stuff.
They absolutely deserve credit for their free tier API keys though. That's unheard of in big cloud - an actual you can't shoot yourself in the foot with a life ruining bill thing. Can't recall what part of their product maze I got it from but it seems to do what it says on tin
The limits are annoying.
Of course I first had to faff about adding the company credit card, which took five tries and two days. Then I found I had to create the appropriate resource group, before I could set up a service. Fair enough, it might make sense later to have costs divided up like that. After I got the resource group, I then thought to start simple and spin up a single VM.
This gave me an error message saying that my request exceeded the quota. Which quota? The built-in copilot in Azure chewed on the raw error in its JSONness, and helpfully told me I could find the Azure quota page by searching for it in the Azure portal.
Once I entered the quota page, I was granted with a message that I was now in the new quota experience in public preview mode. After many clicks I found the appropriate line for the desired VM SKU in the desired region, where it said I had used 0 of the quota of 30. So why didn't it work? I tried to request an increased quota, just in case. That process spent five minutes on "please wait", then failed with a generic error message.
At that point I started googling around, and eventually in some forum thread I found the missing piece: my resource group did not yet have a subscription. After more faffing about, I got a subscription associated with my resource group. What is a subscription, you ask, and what is the relation between a tenant, a subscription and a resource group? I haven't the foggiest, but I've clicked enough buttons to make the errors go away. Por ahora.
How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?!
Another rate limit in the wall.
I have a friend that says Google's decline came when they bought DoubleClick in 2008 and suffered a reverse-takeover: their customers shifted from being Internet users and became other, matchingly-sized corporations.
When Google has a bad/empty profile of you, advertisers don't bid on you, so it goes to the bottom feeders. Average (typically tech illiterate) people wandering through the internet mostly get ads for Tide, Chevy, and [big brand], because they pay Google much more for those well profiled users.
All of that is to say, if you are getting malware/scam ads from Google, it's probably because (ironically) you know what you are doing.
One of my co-workers left with an active account and active card but no passwords noted. The company gave up and just had to cancel + create a new account for the next adwords specialist.
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 to someone before I can buy.
You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.
Does segmentation also count as dynamic pricing?
--
https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much money you’ve received recently and even has an outline what research you plan to do over the next few years since even the detailed applications often get published alongside funding allocations.
The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically spend.
Getting just the university of California should be enough critical mass.
It's not uncommon though for eg departments to have common equipment that they negotiate together.
In your example, you’re paying extra for additional capabilities. Doesn’t really matter if it’s a nonlinear increase in cost with the number of seats. Two companies buy 500 seats and pay the same price.
What I object to is some sales bro deciding I should pay 5x more for those same licenses because of who I am, what I look like, where I’m from, etc. It’s absolutely repulsive. Why can’t you simply provide a fair service at a fair price and stop playing these fuck-fuck games? You’re making a profit on this sale either way. Stop trying to steal my profit margin.
Instead of trying to scam me by abusing information asymmetry, why not use your sales talents to upsell me, once you’ve demonstrated value?
Finding that human is also hard because of the perverse incentives to sell more lucrative products.
A simpler product would be better for consumers, but won't happen because there are industries (and a lot of lobbying) built up around keeping the money train rolling.
My guy saved a lot of people from making dumb mistakes. Then again he's good at his job, and if he was not I would wipe his business. Aligning incentives was very important for me. Most brokers are just bad.
Someone who works in finance or conpliances might want a demo, or views those things as signals the product is for serious use cases.
In these conversations, I never ever see the buyers justifying or requesting a sales process involving people and meetings and opaque pricing.
It’s true that complicated software needs more talking, but there is a LOT of software that could be bought without a meeting. The sales department won’t stand for it though.
Outside of these few examples, SaaS software is almost universally sold to non-technical business leaders.
Also, it isn’t just ICs. I have worked as a senior director, with a few dozen people reporting into me… and I still never want to talk to a sales person on the phone about a product. I want to be able to read the docs, try it out myself, maybe sign up for a small plan. Look, if you want to put the extras (support contracts, bulk discounts, contracting help, etc) behind a sales call, fine. But I need to be able to use your product at a basic level before I would ever do a sales call.
1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.
Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work (and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money), which is issuing government enforced fines.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Parking_Meters
This doesn't apply to private pay lots though, so there's still some amount of "choice".
Also, I only have time for so many hills on which to die. I’m not sure parking reform, while worthy, makes the cut.
I raised the issue with my local city council rep. She didn't care.
customer service is unable to acknowledge why that feature is offered and can only assert that if you park you gotta pay. after threatening to complain to the BBB and my state AG they have graciously offered to drop the ticket to $25.
thank you for listening to me vent :)
Start app, wait for gps, turn time wheel, press start.
Mostly these days all paid parking has registration camera's, and it just starts and stops parking for you automatically. However, there are like 3 or so apps that compete here so you need a profile with all of them for this to work and you also need to enable this on all the apps.
Well you can extend the parking time while not at your car. That is a big plus.
"Give access now, cancel if validation fails" doesn't work either - so long as attackers can extract more than 0 value in that duration they'll flood you with bad accounts.
Besides, Amazon hands out reasonable quotas to newly created accounts without much hassle, and they seem to be doing okay. It's not about abuse.
> talk to people
There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to not do that.
As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc. but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a fundamental bit.
But what do the clients want? Your business should not be structured to make sales people happy.
Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it. Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a demo & a price quote.
My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product (with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired) without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go, as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get more traction in their market.
Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.
Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI can replace.
If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go, it can work well.
If an application is complicated or it’s a tool that the whole business runs on, often times the company will discover their customers have more success with training and a point of contact/account manager to help with onboarding.
Look how quaint this seems now: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/consumer-gro...
I read someone on here who is using Gemini via OpenRouter because it was the only way they could pay for it.
It's not at all hard generally, the core of this issue is centered around gemini-cli which is a hot pile of trash. The inability to get keys or account credentials (like why even use an API key, Google is top notch in auto-auth/WIF)
Insanity to me how gemini-cli is so bad at the basics with so many great Google packages in open source that handle all this transparently. All I need to do is have my gcloud authd with the right account/project
Do you mean Antigravity or Gemini?
If you mean Antigravity then.. how? Their docs say you can't do this.
If you mean Gemini then I personally haven't had issues but haven't tried to productionize a Gemini app. The OPs account seems to reflect other comments here.
> direct API Calls
I suspect Antigravity to be a big flop like gemini-cli. They are so bad in this area they couldn't even write an extension or fork oss-code, instead spending $2B to pork an open source project with someone else's branding
The most annoying company I dealt with was Blizzard. I just wanted to play a game but it took days of back and forth, meanwhile I started to play something else and lost interest.
It'll trigger when you sign up.
It'll trigger if you create an Android developer account.
It'll trigger if you get a new phone.
It'll trigger if your card expires.
It'll trigger the month before your card expires. Why? Fuck you, that's why.
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK
1. cart out in front of the horse a bit on this one, lame hype building at best
2. Not at all what I want the team focusing on, they don't seem to have a clear mission
Generally Google PMs and leaders have not been impressive or in touch for many years, since about the time all the good ones cashed out and started their own companies
hmmm
> 2. Not at all what I want the team focusing on, they don't seem to have a clear mission
allow anyone to build with Google's latest AI models, be the fastest path from prompt to production with Gemini
They'll get to it when it becomes strategically important to.
Why making it easier to pay them isn't always strategically important, I'm not sure.
Otherwise, this sounds a lot like "government bureaucracy." I thought business was supposed to be better.
Same with google ads - super fuckin shit UI/UX, super confusing to understand what is going on.
companies like digital ocean, supabase, etc can make money (from people like me) because they just circumvent the bullshit or wrap the dogshit experience (aws) into a much better experience. bless supabase.
I’m literally afraid of the cloud console dashboards from the big providers. That’s especially true with the quagmire that is AWS. It’s so easy to leave a resource turned on that you are no longer using, and so hard to tell which resource belongs to which project, or have high confidence you set up permissions correctly. They have multiple products whose only job is to monitor and configure your AWS accounts. Multiple. That’s not a brag. That’s an admonition.
Digital Ocean, Hetzner, Render, etc, seem to have figured out how to rent millions of dollars of computers and services out every month without requiring you to become “certified” on their platform.
Now Azure, or anything made by VMware, you just know they hate you.
Yep, which means that even an entire AWS region being down has no impact on anything else. Unlike Azure where a single DC in Texas being out meant no auth for anyone, anywhere in the world.
And aren't Azure and O365 infamous for having a convoluted web or multiple portals to such an extent that there are multiple websites trying to help you navigate them with direct links?
And in any case, Azure is not a serious cloud provider and anyone picking it is at best not paying attention, at worst negligent at their job (yeah I know, Azure is the cloud your bosses' boss picks after some golfing and a nice dinner). They have a ~quarterly critical, trivial to exploit, usually cross-tenant, vulnerability. Often with Microsoft having no mitigation and having the the faintest idea if it was exploited. And stalling the security researchers for weeks if not months.
The security posture of Azure is so appalling it's clear nobody at that org who has any power cares about security in the slightest. And it has been obvious for a few years now. Search Wiz's blog just for their collection of ~10 Azure CVEs. For the latest horrific one, cf: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-55241
Although Azure just randomly fails, and then it turns out it actually worked but the UI had failed. But then the next step throws an obscure error message, but you get around that on a different screen, so on so forth…
I think as you use it, you start to understand the gotchas and the flows you need to do to get something working. I also appreciate there is a ton of stuff they are empowering users to do and the scale is incomprehensible, but just frustrated the UX is so poor.
I just started using Azure for another project and my goodness, I can't even login to that vs the microsoft ads account w/ the same email because of some weird MS365 permissions issue - by far the worst.
Oh and don’t forget that error message being returned when you try to call the API is because you didn’t give your project the proper permissions in google cloud console. What permissions do you need? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Google Cloud Console feels like being stuck in the seventh circle of hell.
100% agree
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)
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
ADK has an option to use litellm (openrouter alternative), among many options
https://google.github.io/adk-docs/agents/models/#using-cloud...
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?
Def use multiple chrome profiles if you aren't. You can color code them to make visual identification a breeze
I don't want my history, bookmarks, open tabs and login sessions at every website divided among my 5 GSuite workspace accounts and my 1 personal Gmail. That adds a bunch of hassle for what? The removal of a minor annoyance when I use these specific Google apps? That is taking a sledge hammer to a slightly bent nail.
Hint: you can often avoid some of this mess by adding the authuser=user@domain to the URL.
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 or 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.
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?
Literally can't think on their own without an AI telling them their thoughts.
> [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.
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.
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.
Google is the worst, it's harder than it should be, and it's stupid to ask for a blacked out credit card, but the whole "they do AI products worse than others" is only slightly more true :)
Even with something as simple as google workspace - permissioning service accounts and authentication are a pain in the ass
The docs suck and of course there’s no one to help
All of that while trying to explain to your non-technical boss how he can browse the voices available at "the Azure thingy" to pick his favourites to then pick and use in the project due relatively soon. Since, of course, you told him the original Cognitive Speech Services (or Speech Services, or Cognitive Services-Speech, or whatever they decided to call it on that specific page) semi-public URL where he could browse the gallery was "speech.microsoft.com" which is now semi-dead with awful loading times that seem some server issue and has been happenning for a few months now. Or tell them to go to the "new foundry" where he might not be able to find the resource or might not have stuff in the regions you were using up until then, or whatever crap this 3.56 trillion-dollar company decides to throw at you to prevent you from using their services.
And all of this is the exploration phase, where you just use the GUIs and copy things around until they work. Then you need to figure out what you did (and more importantly, where) to be able to write some Terraform/OpenTofu or Bicep or similars to try and keep the environment replicable to avoid the excruciating pain of repeating every single step you followed to get it on a working state.
At the very least, Google was nice enough to launch Vertex AI inside GCP for enterprises that have figured that out, and then Google AI Studio as an almost completely separate thing that only is bound to Google Cloud for billing purposes, similar to how Firebase is integrated too.
165 more comments available on Hacker News