We have spend caps at the billing account level and the project level (developer set) in the Gemini API now. There is up to a 10 minute delay in processing everything but this should significantly mitigate the risk here: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#tier-spend-cap...

By default, new Tier 1 paid accounts can only spend $250 in a given month.

I just find it extraordinary that the biggest tech company in the world can do cutting edge real time AI for millions of people, run Youtube and of course all the other google services with having literally the smartest people in the world and unlimited resources on board, but still can't keep real time track of the user's current billing and their spending limits, it's all best effort still. Somehow it doesn't add up. (Pun not intended, but I'm happy to have it)

If spending caps made them more money they'd find a way;)

Not just Google, also Microsoft and Amazon. Real-time cost tracking is technically impossible to solve according to the major cloud providers. I have huge respect for those sales & finops engineers.

Technically impossible for them because real-time attribution cuts into margin. Config-layer tracking does not have that constraint. You do not need real-time billing data if you know from the agent config that it is going to explode before it runs. That is the distinction Traeco is built on. traeco.dev

Not just tech companies, telecommunications too.

Poooooor AT&T, goodness it's hard to know how much data they just sent to us. Hard twenty years ago, just as hard today.

I'm sure it's me being an idiot, but once again I spent 20m trying to figure how to do a specific thing in google-land and still haven't figured it out. Even if I did set it somewhere, I see things like "Setting a budget does not cap resource or API consumption" with a link to a bunch of documentation I have to analyze.

This is what working with cloud services is like, in my experience. Azure's UI feels like it was made as a joke flash game on Newgrounds.

How much of a bill can you run up in 10 minutes?

€26,000 per the fine article

We have a bunch of different protections in place, every account has a billing account cap by default (see: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#tier-spend-cap...), in the addition to the ability to set more granular developer spend caps.

we are bringing billing into AI Studio and adding hard caps by default so you don't overspend

Thank you, Logan! It's a very welcome change! Glad my comment reached you.

nope, at least dev rel in deepmind is part of my product team

my team is responsible for building the worlds best product, every piece of feedback directly influences what we do : )

> cart out in front of the horse a bit on this one, lame hype building at best

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

> 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.

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.

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

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