I am writing to formally escalate and appeal a major, breaking issue regarding the recent overhaul of the Google AI Studio / Gemini API billing system, which has effectively locked us out of utilizing our active partnership credits.
The Situation
Our project operates under the 2024 GFS Cloud Program - Ecosystem Partner initiative. We currently have an active promotional credit line with a remaining balance of ~$25K.
Until a few days ago, everything was working perfectly. All of our Google AI Studio usage was correctly offset by these credits. Overnight, our access was disrupted. As seen in attached image, Google Cloud Services remain on Postpay, but AI Studio has been forcefully bifurcated and moved to a Prepay method.
The Support Response & The Catch-22
I contacted Google Cloud Billing Support (Case open Google Cloud Support #72040715), and the agent confirmed that this is due to a recent mandatory transition for Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts into a Prepay billing system. I was told that to unlock the “Switch to Postpay” button and use my billing account normally, our account must reach Tier 3, which requires:
The account to be at least 30 days old.
A cumulative cash spend of $1,000/month.
Herein lies the critical flaw and the reason for this escalation: Google is demanding we spend $1,000 out-of-pocket in cash just to unlock the ability to use our active, prepaid-equivalent promotional funds already sitting in our account.
Why This Policy is Broken for Ecosystem Partners
Credits are Prepaid Funds: Promotional credits granted through official Google programs are a form of prepayment. Treating partner accounts with massive active balances as “zero-funded risk accounts” makes no sense.
Forced Migration to Vertex AI is Not an Equivalent Fix: Support suggested we move our workloads to Vertex AI to use the credits. However, Google AI Studio is a distinct environment with different tooling, rapid prototyping capabilities, and API structures. Forcing a developer to rewrite their pipeline because of a billing backend overhaul defeats the purpose of the Ecosystem Partner program.
Punishing Active Partners: We built our architecture around AI Studio precisely because Google incentivized us with these credits to adopt your AI ecosystem.
Our Request to the Product & Billing Teams
This policy creates an impossible loop for startups and ecosystem partners who have been granted substantial credit lines.
Immediate Request: We need Google AI Studio/Billing engineers to manually override or whitelist Ecosystem Partner billing accounts (or accounts with verified, high-value promotional balances) to remain on Postpay so our credits can continue to offset usage.
Long-term Request: The tier system rules must be updated to count active promotional credit balances toward your tier standing, rather than strictly tracking out-of-pocket cash spend.
I was directed by Cloud Billing support to post this here as a formal appeal. I would appreciate it if a community manager or Google engineer could escalate this internally to the AI Studio product team.
Update — Additional Request: Allowlist for Nano Banana Pro on Vertex AI
Due to the billing bifurcation issue described above, I have migrated my image generation pipeline from AI Studio to Vertex AI (project: vertex-498808, region: global). However, the publicly available model gemini-2.5-flash-image does not meet the quality requirements for e-commerce catalog image generation on Myntra marketplace.
I am requesting allowlist access for the following models on my Vertex AI project:
gemini-3-pro-image-preview (Nano Banana Pro)
gemini-3.1-flash-image-preview (Nano Banana 2, as fallback)
Project details:
GCP Project ID: vertex-498808
Region: global
Billing: Active GFS Cloud Program — Ecosystem Partner credits (same account referenced in support case #72040715)
Agent Platform API: Enabled
Use case: Automated batch generation of apparel catalog images for Myntra marketplace listings. We are an official Universal Music India licensed merchandise partner generating catalog images for 50+ music merchandise SKUs.
These models were working correctly via AI Studio until the mandatory Prepay migration disrupted our access. This allowlist request is a direct consequence of the billing system change described in the original post above.
