I would love to see all the big players put 1% of the effort they put into model training into making the basic process of paying and signing in suck less.

Claude: they barely have a signin system at all. Multiple account support doesn’t exist. The minimum seat count for business is nonsense. The data retention policies are weak.

OpenAI: Make ZDR a thing you can use or buy without talking to sales, already. And for those using containers or a remote system or really anything other than local development with the codex CLI, you really really need to fix this bug. I bet Codex could do at least the client part for you!

https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/2798

(Hint: Claude Code gets this right by default, despite the fact that everything else about Claude sign-in is a joke.)

Google: get all your B2B AI product managers in one room and tell them that they need to make one single product menu on one single webpage with all the pricing on that page and that the Google Cloud people are not permitted to make anything that isn’t actually logically Google Cloud depend on Google Cloud Billing. Your product cannot compete with OpenAI or Anthropic if people need to ask an LLM to figure out what your product is and if your own fancy LLMs can’t give a straight answer. My company pays for a non-Google product primarily because it’s too complicated to pay for the Google product! Right now, trying to use Google’s AI is like trying to ride Bay Area public transit before the Clipper Card.

Agree 1,000%.

I just won’t even waste my time with the google stuff cuz I can’t figure out how to pay with it.

And that’s a problem everywhere at google. Our google play account is suspended cuz I can’t verify the company. It won’t let me cuz it says I’m not the owner. I’ve always been the owner of my company. For 18 years. There is no one else.

Once some error said make sure the owner email matches your profile in google payments and I was like, what is google payments and where do I even begin with that? I’ve never paid for google play so what does payments have to do with anything?

It’s totally random stuff. Get your shit together, google. Make your products and payment systems coherent, rather than it obviously looking like it was designed by a fiefdom full of territorial managers.

Couldn't agree more about the google product offerings. Vertex AI? AI Studio? Maker studio? Gemini? The documentation is fragmented with redundant offerings making it confusing to determine what is what. GCS billing is complicated to figure out vs OpenAI billing or anthropic.

Sad part is Google does offer a ChatML/OpenAI compliant endpoint to do LLM calls and I believe they in an experiment also reduced friction in getting an API key to start making calls right away but discoverability ever remains a challenge with google services.

Google keeps changing their privacy and “don’t train on my data/code” options. When gemini-cli launched, there was a clear toggle for “don’t train on my code.” That’s now gone; it just links to a generic privacy page for me. Maybe something with my account changed, I can't figure it out. Deep in the Cloud Gemini console, there’s another setting that might control training, but it’s not clear what products it actually covers.

Trying to pay for Gemini-3 is confusing. Maybe an AI Ultra personal subscription? I already pay for OpenAI and Anthropic’s pro/max plans and would happily pay Google too. But the only obvious option is a $250/month tier, and its documentation indicates Google can train on your code unless you find and enable the correct opt-out. If that opt-out exists in all the products, it’s not obvious where it lives or what products it applies to.

Workspace complicates it further. Google advertises that with business workspace accounts your data isn’t used for training. So, I was going to try Antigravity on our codebase. At this point I know I can't trust Google, so I read the ToS carefully. They train on your prompts and source code, and there doesn't appear to be a way to pay them and opt out right now. Be careful, paying for Google Workspace does not protect you, always read the ToS.

Be careful with AI-studio and your Google Workspace accounts. They train on your prompts unless you switch it to API mode.

The result is a lot of uncertainty. I genuinely have no idea how to pay Google for Gemini without risking my code being used for training. And if I do pay, I can’t tell whether they’ll train on my prompts anyway.

The marketing for their coding products does not clearly state when they do or do not train on your prompts and code.

I had to run deep research to understand the risks with using Gemini 3 for agentic work, and I still don't feel confident that I understand the risks. I might have said some incorrect things above, but I am just so confused. I feel like I have a <75% grasp on the situation.

I don't have a lot of trust. And honestly, this feels confusing and deceptive. One could easily confuse it as deliberate strategy to gather training data through ambiguity and dark patterns, it certainly looks like this could be Google's strategy to win the AI race. I assume this is just how it looks, and that they aren't being evil on purpose.

OpenAI in particular has my trust. They get it. They are carefully building the customer experience, they are product and customer driven from the top.

At this point I’m not convinced that Gemini 3 Pro was post-trained on data Google had permission to use, going by the myriad of issues on the Gemini CLI tracker around Google AI/Google One/Google Cloud/Google Workspaces.

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/12121

It is far too easy to accidentally end up under the wrong privacy agreement, to the point of where some workplaces are banning use of the Gemini CLI!

> Claude: they barely have a signin system at all. Multiple account support doesn’t exist. The minimum seat count for business is nonsense. The data retention policies are weak.

Please give me an option for a password (or passkey) or literally anything else that doesn't require either linking with google or going through an email flow for every login

ZDR is a risk thing for them. They want to make sure you're a legitimate company and have monitoring in place on your side to reduce the chance you're using them for illegal things.

Adding to this, Google's models can only be used with GCP while OpenAI's models can be used with Azure, Anthropic's models can be used with AWD Bedrock, in addition to their own platforms.

I'd love to see the Gemini models being available by other providers :) or if they just build a simple prepaid wallet like OpenAI and Anthropic.

It seems pretty clear the moat is built at the application layer, how enjoyable/easy the actual application is to use, but these applications seem to be getting worse over time even as the models get better. Is it really that hard to do both? Isn’t the point of agentic coding to do more better (not just more)?

Its the same with Cursor. As a Cursor Admin I want the ability to enable only specific models and disable the rest to save costs but I cannot do that. It should be pretty simple to do it but for some reason Cursor wont add that functionality in their Admin tools.

And stop asking for phone numbers for "fraud prevention" when I've already given you my name, address and credit card.

Last night, just after Gemini 3 was released and became available for Gemini-CLI, I saw Gemini-CLI's team post that you could access Gemini 3 with either an API key OR with _Gemini AI Ultra_, so I thought: great, I'll get that!

Now you CAN NOT get the Google One stuff if your account is part of a workspace. I thought: how awful. I want to pay, but I simply can't?

Oh, but then I noticed: You CAN add a _Gemini AI Ultra_ license via the Google Workspace Admin area, great!

Turns out: you fucking can't. That's _Google AI Ultra FOR BUSINESS_ and that IS NOT supported.

So I had to get the Google One subscription on my personal account after all.

Combine that with the _pathetic_ usage limits: somehow not token-based, but amount of requests per 24 hour window (which is 500 for Gemini 3) and Gemini 3's incredible chattiness (it uses A LOT more requests to get something done compared to Claude) and you hit the usage limits in just 2 hours.

Google listen to this man and fire 90% of your useless product managers!

Such great case studies of how LLM coding will make all of your employees 1000x more productive at coding, design, and UX. They really are leading the way showing us into the brighter future of AI software /s