I am writing to report an issue with the Gemini API tier upgrade system.
We have spent nearly $2000 on Gemini API usage, and our billing account has been active with successful payments for well over a month now. Based on the rate limits documentation, we should be eligible for Tier 3 at this point. However, when I check my API key page at https://aistudio.google.com/apikey, our tier is still showing as Tier 1 with no upgrade option available.
We have a properly linked post-pay billing account in good standing. Payments have been processing without any issues. Our usage has been consistent and legitimate. Yet the automatic tier upgrade that the documentation describes has simply not happened.
This is causing real problems for our production application. We are hitting rate limits constantly and it is affecting our users.
Is there something we need to do manually to trigger the upgrade, or is this a known issue with the tier system? The documentation suggests the upgrade should be automatic once the requirements are met, but that does not appear to be the case for us.
I can provide our Project ID and Billing Account ID via direct message if that helps with investigating this issue.
Update - Critical Blocker: Hit $250 Monthly Cap, Complete Deadlock
Following up on my previous post as the situation has now become critical.
We have now hit the $250 monthly spending cap for Tier 1, and our entire Gemini API integration is completely dead. Our production system cannot make any more API calls until the billing cycle resets.
Here is the deadlock we are facing:
We are stuck at Tier 1 with a $250/month spending limit
We have already spent nearly $2000 total, meeting all Tier 3 eligibility requirements
No amount of credit top-up solves this - the tier cap blocks us regardless of available balance
There is no self-service option to upgrade our tier
The automatic tier upgrade system is not working
No response from support channels
This is not just an inconvenience anymore. Our production application serving real users is now completely blocked from using the Gemini API. We cannot increase our spending limit. We cannot manually upgrade our tier. We have money ready to spend but the system will not let us.
The tier system has created a situation where a paying customer who wants to pay more simply cannot. This is a complete deadend.
Can someone from Google please intervene and manually upgrade our account? We need this resolved urgently. I am happy to provide Project ID and Billing Account details via DM.
This is blocking our business operations right now.
Hello @Tania_Dase,
Can you provide your project number (not the project ID) via direct message. To send a direct message, click on my profile picture or name, and then select the Message button.
Hello, I’m currently unable to send direct messages from my account. Could a member of the Moderation team please enable this feature for me? Thank you for your assistance.
We’re having the same issue - “Your billing account has exceeded its monthly spending cap. Please go to AI Studio at https://ai.studio/billingto manage your billing” despite a significant spend history that should put us well above Tier 1. Monthly spend so far is less than $600 so it looks like we’re being capped as if we were only at Tier 1.
I’ve direct messaged @Pooja_Kapse with the project number, but conscious that the time difference might mean someone else at Google is better placed to investigate this right now.
A potential clue - all our usage has been in the Gemini API. If you looked at our spend on Gemini API calls, we would be Tier 2. But we have never used AI Studio. And in AI Studio, it says that we are Tier 1 (even though it lists all our previous transactions for Gemini API usage on the very same page!)
Could you share an update on the review status and an estimated timeframe for the internal team’s response? Please let me know if any additional information is needed from our side.
Following up on this issue: we sent our billing account number on April 16, but haven’t received any response yet.
We’ve already spent nearly $2,000, but our account still appears stuck at Tier 1 / spending cap limits, which is blocking our use of Gemini services.
Could Google Support please confirm:
whether this is being reviewed,
whether anything else is needed from us, and
when we can expect an update?
At this point, we’re effectively stuck and need a clear next step.
Even though the documentation says it happens automatically, there seems to be a bug (several bugs?) and this doesn’t happen automatically. And even when it does happen, you get downgraded without warning and for no reason, so you need to submit the form again.
You can also try chatting with the billing help service via the Google cloud console. You will have to ask to speak to a human, because the AI bot doesn’t know about this. Even then, sometimes the human will be very helpful, and other times they will tell you that you can’t get to Tier 3 until you’re spending $20k per month (which is obviously impossible).
That actually explains a lot — it does seem like the “automatic” upgrade path is not working reliably in practice. We’ll submit the billing cap increase form as well and try billing chat again.
Also sorry to hear you’ve had this happen multiple times too. Pretty frustrating experience.
Thanks again for pointing us in the right direction.
