Is there a way to use the Web UI with my API key?

Google AI Studio
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Hi is there a way to use my API key with the Google AI Studio Web GUI? It’s the best UI for what I want to do. But it appears even if I connect my API billing account, it doesn’t work with the Google AI Studio UI. That would be so easy to enable and so useful.

Background - I am refactoring python code - large amounts of it. I need long context and a high rate limit because I am doing requests against a long context window 500K - 1M tokens so it eats up the free rate limit after like just a few requests. Then I have to wait (hours?) to do another request? The free version seems to rate limit me out after like just a few turns. That’s not gonna work at all.

I don’t want to have to write my own Chat UI to replicate what yours already does, just to do what I want to do with the API. Your UI has a lot of really useful features (like for example being able to edit and delete past messages of user and model). I mean yeah sure I could build one, but I don’t want to - I want to build MY app. Isn’t there a way to use your UI for that with my API key? I don’t mind paying for the tokens. I just want the UI because it’s working really well for me. Is there a solution to this?

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Currently, Google AI Studio does not support using custom API keys within the web UI.
It’s bound to your Google account’s usage tier and quota, not to externally provisioned API keys or billing accounts.

Alternatives that can be taken are:-

  1. To scale beyond free limits, use the Gemini API via REST or Python SDK with your billing-enabled API key:
    Gemini API quickstart  |  Google AI for Developers

  2. If you want a similar UI, you can:
    – Clone and adapt a basic open-source chat UI from the Gemini Cookbook:
    GitHub - google-gemini/cookbook: Examples and guides for using the Gemini API
    – Add token tracking and message editing capabilities.