Request for manual review – 403 PERMISSION_DENIED / project Restricted

Gemini API
1

Hello Gemini API Team,

I am requesting a manual review of an unexpected Gemini API access restriction.

Project name: Home Assistant Veggskjerm
Project ID: home-assistant-veggskjerm
Project number: 7912737607..
Account type: Personal Google account
Region: Norway
Billing: Free tier, no billing account attached
Use case: Private, low-volume Google Gemini integration with my local Home Assistant installation.

Google AI Studio shows:

  • Project status: Restricted

  • Billing tier: Unavailable

Every generate-content request returns:

403 PERMISSION_DENIED
“Your project has been denied access. Please contact support.”

The API key was created normally in Google AI Studio. There has been no successful Gemini API usage, public traffic, bulk automation, scraping, proxying, quota circumvention, or known policy violation.

I followed the current instruction to contact Cloud Billing Support, but the support assistant refused the request because I am not an administrator of any billing account. This is expected because the project is intended to use the free tier and has no billing account attached.

There is no appeal button or explanatory banner visible in Google AI Studio beyond the Restricted / Unavailable status.

Could a member of the Gemini API team manually review the project or provide a working appeal path?

I can provide additional account details privately if required. I will not post the API key publicly.

Thank you.

2

Hello @Smarthus ,

Getting a 403 API error response and / or seeing “Unavailable” next to your project in AI audio indicates a flag has been placed on your account. To proceed:

If you’re on the free tier with no billing attached:

Please try the below steps:

  1. Check Model Availability & Rate Limits:
  • Ensure that the model you are requesting is available on your current plan. For example, not all models are available on the free tier. You can verify model availability, quotas, and limits on the AI Studio Rate Limit dashboard.
  1. Ensure you have completed age verification by navigating to Google Account Age Verification and verifying date of birth in Google Account Personal Info."
  2. Complete Phone Verification and turn on 2-Step Verification (2SV) on the Google Account associated with your project.
  3. Once age, phone and 2sv are configured, retry your request or create a new API key in Google AI Studio.
  4. If completing these steps still does not restore access (or if using a model requiring a paid tier), you might want to consider adding prepayment credits directly in Google AI Studio and/ or attaching a Google Cloud Billing account in the Google Cloud Console.
3

Thank you. I have now completed all the recommended steps:

  • Age verification is complete.

  • A phone number is registered.

  • 2-Step Verification is enabled.

  • No billing account is attached to the project.

  • I retried creating a new API key in Google AI Studio.

The project still shows “Restricted”. Existing API requests return:

403 PERMISSION_DENIED: “Your project has been denied access. Please contact support.”

Creating a new API key returns:

“Failed to generate API key. The request is suspicious. Please try again.”