Free of Charge plan Change to Paid Plan Automatically

Gemini API
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1

Hello everyone,

I have been using Gemini Free of Charge plan API key for a while. Everything seemed fine until recently. It changed to Paid plan. I tried to create new free API key with my other project within the same billing. It appear to be free plan, but as I refreshed my browser, and suddenly my plan switched to a paid version without any action on my part. Has anyone else experienced this? How can I switch back to the free plan? Is there something I missed during the setup process?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance.

Update

Found the issue. Someone added the project into billing plan in the GCP console. Just remove the project from the billing plan in GCP billing. Thanks everyone!

2

Welcome to the forum. The API key can’t mutate from free plan to billed plan by itself, the scenario I can imagine is that the project id has more people associated with it and some other person on the team selected the billing option.

Hope that helps.

4

Welcome to the forums!

This sounds like an odd problem, but one thing you said stands out:

Any key attached to a project that is attached to a billing account becomes a paid plan. If you want a key that is on the free tier, you should create it in a project that is not attached to a billing account.

6

No one remembers getting an email saying they were switching free to paid plan? Im sure i could find it but they def sent one out.