First off, apologies for the bad first impression, the team is pushing super hard to make sure it is easy to access these models.

- On permission issue, not sure I follow the flow that got you there, pls email me more details if you are able too and happy to debug: Lkilpatrick@google.com

- On overall friction for billing: we are working on a new billing experience built right into AI Studio that will make it super easy to add a CC and go build. This will also come along with things like hard billing caps and such. The expected ETA for global rollout is January!

Just a note that your HN bio says "Developer Relations @OpenAI"

Congrats on the move to Google!

Please allow me to rant to someone who can actually do something about this.

Vertex AI has been a nightmare to simply sign up, link a credit card, and start using Claude Sonnet (now available on Vertex AI).

The sheer number of steps required for this (failed) user journey is dizzying:

* AI Studio, get API key

* AI Studio, link payment method: Auto-creates GCP property, which is nice

* Punts to GCP to actually create the payment method and link to GCP property

* Try to use API key in Claude Code; need to find model name

* Look around to find actual model name, discover it is only deployed on some regions, thankfully, the property was created on the correct region

* Specify the new endpoint and API key, Claude Code throws API permissions errors

* Search around Vertex and find two different places where the model must be provisioned for the account

* Need to fill out a form to get approval to use Claude models on GCP

* Try Claude Code again, fails with API quota errors

* Check Vertex to find out the default quota for Sonnet 4.5 is 0 TPM (why is this a reasonable default?)

* Apply for quota increase to 10k tokens/minute (seemingly requires manual review)

* Get rejection email with no reasoning

* Apply for quota increase to 1 token/minute

* Get rejection email with no reasoning

* Give up

Then I went to Anthropic's own site, here's what that user journey looks like:

* console.anthropic.com, get API key

* Link credit card

* Launch Claude Code, specify API key

* Success

I don't think this is even a preferential thing with Claude Code, since the API key is working happily in OpenCode as well.

Hi, is your team planning on adding a spending cap? Last I tried, there was no reasonable way to do this. It keeps me away from your platform because runaway inference is a real risk for any app that calls LLMs programatically.

Oh man, there is so, so much pain here. Random example - if GOOGLE_GENAI_USE_VERTEXAI=true in your environment, woe betide you if you're trying to use gemini cli with an API key. Error messages don't match up with actual problems, you'll be told to log in using the cli auth for google, then you'll be told your API keys have no access.. It's just a huge mess. I still don't really know if I'm using a vertex API key or a non-vertex one, and I don't want to touch anything since I somehow got things running..

Anyway vai com dios, I know that there's a fundamental level of complexity deploying at google, and deploying globally, but it's just really hard compared to some competitors. Sadly, because the gemini series is excellent!

Maybe the team should push hard before releasing the product instead of after to make it work.

The new releases this week baited me into business ultra subscription. Sadly it’s totally useless for gemini 3 cli and now also nano banana does not work. Just wow.

Please make sure that the new billing experience has support for billing limits and prepaid balance (to avoid unexpected charges)!

The fact that your team is worrying about billing is...worrying. You guys should just be focused on the product (which I love, thanks!)

Google has serious fragmentation problems, and really it seems like someone else with high rank should be enforcing (and have a team dedicated to) a centralized frictionless billing system for customers to use.

I had the same reaction as them many months ago, the Google Cloud and Vertex AI stuff namespacing is a too messy. The different paths people might take to learning and trying to use the good new models needs properly mapping out and fixing so that the UX makes sense and actually works as they expect.

I had pretty much written off ever my credit card to Google, but a better billing experience and hard billing caps might change that.

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