I have experienced an isnane uptick in costs due to what seems to be the GoogleSearch Grounding.
Picture of my Google Cloud Console stats attached - Blue bar - since april 8th.
My app has not changed - users have not changed significantly (+30% since same period last month) - We have GoogleSearch grounding included in one tool that made a total of 50 google search requests on each day - visible through the logs in the AI studio.
It seems like Gemini-3-flash-preview which causes the costs apparently mistakes every single function call for my tools as search queries. This is a breaking issue - I am forced to downgrade to gemini-2.5-flash in the meantime until this will be fixed or otherwise swap models over to Qwen-3.6-flash…
I am going to start a billing dispute to see if that has any chance of going through. This is clearly a bug - not on my side as the service has been unchanged since March 17th.
Hi @Felix_Thoeni ,
Can you share your project number via DM ?
it won’t let me send a dm. can I send it to you via mail?
I have had a similar issue Felix with no attempt at resolution so far. We have had to swap across to GPT for our production version.
Have they managed to resolve or assist in any issue for Gemini 3?
I’ve been asked to provide my Project Number, and in another Thread I’ve been in about the same Issue one of the staff has answered that they’ve identified the issue and “are actively working to resolve it”. I guess that should be that. If the issue continues to the end of the month they’ll get a billing dispute, because I have been collecting the evidence I am not using what I’m being billed - all our requests pass our AWS backend that logs exactly when a SearchGrounding toolcall has been made.
I just really want the issue to be resolved as my app is currently making 7 figures ARR and we do not want to have to swap over to other services. They only LLM that can compete with Gemini-flash is Qwen3.6-Flash and getting a stable connection with their servers in Europe is troublesome to say the least.
Hi,
As mentioned in another thread, due to a misconfiguration of the billing system for the Gemini API, users of the Google Search grounding tool were billed for a larger amount of searches than they consumed. The issue is now fixed, and we are working on a process to fix the billed amount. We will keep this thread updated.
