But then we'd complain about Google being a slow moving dinosaur.

"Move fast and break things" cuts both ways !

(ex-Google tech lead, who took down the Google.com homepage... twice!)

Its not a new problem though, and its not just billing. The UI across Gemini just generally sucks (across AI Studio and the chat interfaces) and there's lots of annoying failure cases where Gemini will just timeout and stop working entirely midrequest.

Been like this for quite a while, well before Gemini 3.

So far I continue to put up with it because I find the model to be the best commercial option for my usage, but its amazing how bad modern Google is at just basic web app UX and infrastructure when they were the gold standard for such for like, arguably decades prior.

We are talking here about the most basic things- nothing AI related. Basic billing. The fact that it is not working says a lot about the future of the product and company culture in general (obviously they are not product-oriented)