Complete google cloud newbie question: How do I change to the pay-as-you-go tier for Gemini in the google cloud API. I have been using OpenAI’s API and just starting to work with Google APIs. I also helplessly lost in their console…
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Starting from AI Studio, go to the Get API key page. There is a link to your project’s Google cloud console where the yellow arrow is pointing:
Click or tap on it and you get to the console. There is a menu that unfolds when you use the three horizontal bars top left corner.
The menu option Billing is what you are looking for.
There is another place more specific to Google cloud questions, here we try to stay with AI, ML and API related questions. The Google cloud community is at https://www.googlecloudcommunity.com/gc/
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Thanks. I will ask over there.
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Hey @GregH, welcome! This is a very fair question, here is the process outlined step by step:
- Open AI Studio, select the Setting button in the bottom left
- Select the “Plan information” button
- Select “Set up billing”, this will open up Google Cloud which is where we do billing
- Select “Link a billing account”, if you don’t have an existing billing account listed there, then open “Manage billing accounts” in a new tab (since you will need to come back to this page).
If you do have a billing account, select it from the drop down and then select “Set account” and you are all done! 
- If you need to create a new billing account, select “Create account” in the top right hand corner
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Work through the create billing flow, after you submit and create the billing account.
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Navigate back to the screen from step 4, and finish the flow through that step.
Please let me know if you run into any issues during this process!
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This is horrible interface, from ai.google.dev to console.cloud.google.com then back to ai.google.dev.
why not just switch to vertexai at this point
Thanks! Very useful. So easy to get lost on the console page.
I am still confused though.
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My project is set up for billing. It says “Paid” under plan. However, my billing account shows 0 in charges for the 1000+ requests over the last days (almost all to 1.5-Flash). (there are unrelated charges for storage stuff)
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On your third screenshot with “Plan information”, I can only selected “Gemini 1.0 Pro” in the “Billed model pricing” and the “Free of charge” tier is blue.
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I am getting rate limited at what I think is the lower limit with regular “429 Resource has been exhausted” return codes. The model information here say the free limit is 15 RPM and pay-as-you go is 360 RPM.
There also is the “Output token limit”. I thought that is per call but the ** is confusing.
This is likely because we have not launched billing for 1.5 Flash yet. If you go to https://aistudio.google.com/app/plan_information, select “Billed model pricing”, you should see only Gemini 1.0 pro on that list. We are launching paid access for 1.5 Flash and Pro on May 30th.
At the moment, this is the expected behavior.
Yeah, sorry for the confusion, you will only have access to 1.0 paid higher rate limits for now.
Let me know if I can be of more help!
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Hey @Harry_Peng, agreed that is not ideal, part of the thinking for why it is the way it is:
- We don’t need / want to build new billing infrastructure from scratch, we can use Cloud billing and focus engineer efforts on other things
- If someone migrates from Google AI Studio to Vertex AI, they will already have most stuff setup and the transition will be easier
- There are lots of special things you need to do when you handle credit cards and that type of info, using cloud billing helps keep folks secure from that lens
With that said, we are looking into ways to embed more of the experience inside AI Studio to reduce how much you need to jump back and forth. This is top of mind for me!
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Thanks. Glad to hear about May 30! Flash has been really great for my use cases…
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Hello
I also have a question related to billing.
I use the Gemini 1.0 and 1.5 models via API, without going beyond the free limits (1500 requests per day and 15 requests per minute). At the same time, in “console.cloud.google.com/billing/” I am billed every day, and there is not even any detail for what exactly, it is indicated only for Gemini, without a version.
Above you indicated that version 1.5 is still free, which means this is all the price for version 1.0, but then it is not clear to me whether it even has a free tariff for the API.
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still no reply? i wanna know about this