I tried Gemini CLI and in 2 hours somehow spent $22 just messing around with a very small codebase. I didn’t find out until the next day from Google’s billing system. That was enough for me - I won’t touch it again.

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adrianbooth17 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Isn't Gemini CLI free? Or did you BYOK?

	▲	squirrellous 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The free usage gets exhausted really fast. I had a similar experience as the parent where I easily burned through $70+ in two days with two requests in a medium size codebase. Then I switched to free, and it couldn’t finish a single request end to end. On top of this Gemini CLI still doesn’t support paying through the Google AI subscription. I assume it’s some sort of bureaucratic reason that’s preventing them from moving quickly.
	▲	GiorgioG 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		BYOK

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JofArnold 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Same. 30m tokens in a few hours (of which many were cached it seems and only a few output tokens). I use Gemini to solve only specific problems and in my case $20+ was worth it.