Hello,
I am writing to formally report a critical issue regarding the developer tiering system and to request a manual audit from the AI Studio engineering team.
- Billing Account ID: 012653-8D8DD2-****** (Masked for privacy)
- Support Case ID: 71458063
- Current Balance: $97.00+ (Prepaid $100 on April 9th, 2026)
On April 9th, I made a $100 prepayment into my prepaid wallet explicitly to unlock Tier 2 capacity, strictly following the guidelines in the Gemini API documentation. The system successfully activated Tier 2 for my project. However, recently, my project was silently flipped back to Tier 1 without any prior notice or email notification, despite my balance remaining nearly untouched.
I immediately contacted Cloud Billing Support (Case: 71458063) to resolve this ledger issue. To my concern, the agent (Shoeb) provided incorrect information, claiming that under a “new 2026 policy,” developers are downgraded to Tier 1 if they have low usage and haven’t fully consumed their prepaid cash balance yet. When I pointed out that this directly contradicts the official documentation—which states that a $100 cumulative deposit is a one-time milestone to lock in Tier 2—the agent closed my case and redirected me here, stating that dynamic tiering is completely out of their scope.
As a customer who has fully met the financial requirements over a month ago, being restricted to Tier 1 capacity is an clear error. This appears to be a backend synchronization bug where the AI Studio quota engine fails to recognize a valid prepaid balance.
Could a Google AI Studio forum moderator or technical engineer please review my billing account ledger (linked to my forum account) and manually restore my project to Tier 2?
(Attached below is the screenshot of my AI Studio dashboard, clearly showing a $97 balance remaining while the account is wrongfully flagged as Tier 1. Sensitive IDs have been hidden for security.)
Thank you for your assistance.
