I hope they fail.

I honestly do not wish Google to have the best model out there and be forced to use their incomprehensible subscription / billing / project management whatever shit ever again.

I don’t know what their stuff cost. I don’t know why would I use vertex or ai studio. What is included in my subscription what is billed per use.

I pray that whatever they build fails and burns.

For a personal plan to use premium Gemini AI features or for agentic development with Gemini CLI/Antigravity the billing is no more or less complicated then Claude Code or Codex CLI.

You pay for the $20/mo Google AI Pro plan with a credit card via the normal personal billing flow like you would for a Google One plan without any involvement of Google Cloud billing or AI Studio. Authorize in the client with your account and you're good to go.

(With the bundled drive storage on AI Pro I'm just paying a few bucks more than I was before so for me it's my least expensive AI subscription excluding the Z.ai ultra cheap plan).

Or, just like with Anthropic or OpenAI, it's a separate process for billing/credits for an API key targeted at a developer audience. Which I don't need or use for Gemini CLI or Antigravity at all, it's a one step "click link to authorize with your Google Account" and done.

You could decide to use an API key for usage based billing instead (just like you could with Claude Code) but that's entirely unnecessary with a subscription.

Sure, for the API anything involving a hyperscalar cloud is going to have a higher complexity floor with legacy cruft here and there, but for individual subscriptions that's irrelevant and it's pretty much as straightforward of a click and pay flow you'd find anywhere else.

They all suck. OpenAI ignores scanning limits and disabled routes in robots.txt, after a 429 "Too Many Requests" they retry the same url half a dozen of times from different IPs in the next couple of minutes, and they once DoS'ed my small VPS trying to do a full scan of sitemaps.xml in less than one hour, trying and retrying if any endpoint failed.

Google and others at least respects both robots.txt and 429s. They invested years scanning all the internet, so they can now train on what they have stored in their server. OpenAI seems to assume that MY resources are theirs.

Eventually the models will be generally be so good that the competition moves from the best model to the best user experience and here I think we can expect others will win, e.g. Microsoft with GitHub and VS Code