403 PERMISSION_DENIED "Your project has been denied access" on two projects, no notification

Gemini API
1

Both of my projects return 403 PERMISSION_DENIED with
“Your project has been denied access. Please contact support.”
on every generateContent call, across all models.

Project IDs:
gen-lang-client-085567176.. (Default Gemini Project, created 2026-08-07)
gen-lang-client-06806976.. (created 2026-08-23, restricted within minutes)

Account: rs...@gmail.com
First failure: 2026-08-23, around 16:12 UTC. It worked before that.
Billing: none, free tier only.

Both projects show “Restricted - This Project’s API access is restricted”
in AI Studio. A newly created project was restricted almost immediately,
which suggests this is account-scoped rather than project-scoped.

This is not the unrestricted-key enforcement from June 19: the key I tested
is a new restricted key generated in AI Studio, and the error refers to the
project, not the key. There is no suspension flag on any project in the
Cloud console, and I received no notification email.

Usage was a personal single-user meal-photo app: well under 60 requests per
day, one image and a short text prompt per request, structured JSON output.
No batch traffic, no scraping, no resale, no shared keys. I am not aware of
any policy violation.

Could you review and restore free-tier access?

2

Hi @rsdev, Please try the below steps:

  1. Check Model Availability & Rate Limits:

    • Ensure that the model you are requesting is available on your current plan. For example, not all models are available on the free tier. You can verify model availability, quotas, and limits on the AI Studio Rate Limit dashboard.

  2. Verify your Google Account:

  3. Upgrade to a Paid Tier:

    • If verifying your account does not restore access (or if using a model requiring a paid tier), you can unlock access by adding prepayment credits directly in Google AI Studio or attaching a Google Cloud Billing account in the Google Cloud Console.