It's not unfair its how every business works. When your product is new or not yet good enough and you want people to try it you give them discounts, or if you want to drive traffic to your service you also do the same.

Even traditional businesses do this with coupons. Is it unfair that Costco sells chickens for under cost because it drives usage to them?

Companies like Uber did use massive funding and price subsidization to try and kill competition and then take a monopoly, but it is hard to assert that this is what google is doing now. And given that other competitors in the space, Anthropic are doing the exact same thing again its not as though they are alone.

Also they could be subsidizing it because they want that usage type as it helps them train models better.

Chatgpt and gpt4 were all ran at a loss and subsidized people just didn't know that. Almost all of the llm companies have been selling 1 dollar of llm compute for 50 cents as they valued the usage, training data, and users more than making profit now.

This next generation of MOE and other newly trained models. Like opus 4.6, Cursor Composer 1.5, gpt 5.3 codex, and many of the others have been the first models where these companies are actually profitably serving the tokens at the api cost.

This year has been the switch where ai companies are actually thinking of becoming profitable instead of just focusing on research and development.

> Essentially these are unfair business practices, product cross subsidization to ensure market dominance.

Offering a different discounted rate for a service, though their first-party platform is not an unfair business practice whatsoever, though. The bar isn't what you disagree with, or what you think their motives are without any substantial proof. They could even make a honest argument that they can aggressively key-value cache default prompts from their own software reducing inference costs.

>See also: Microsoft and a whole bunch of other companies.

What does that have to do with Google?

"PAYGO API access" vs "Monthly Tool Subscription" is just a matter of different unit economics; there's nothing particularly unusual or strange about the idea on its own, specific claims against Google notwithstanding.

Of course, Google is still in the wrong here for instantly nuking the account instead of just billing them for API usage instead (largely because an autoban or whatever easier, I'm sure).

So you are saying a company should never reinvest profits in the company to support another money losing business until it’s profitable?

Should Netflix for instance not invested money from renting DVDs to invest in a streaming service?

Apple not use the profits it was making from selling Apple //e’s to create the Mac?

No, it's more like stuffing your pockets in all-you-can-eat buffet

Its called economies of scale. When they server 200000 ai subscriptions they dont expect everyone to use the max. They expect some will use more and some will use less and at the end of the day it will even out. Thats how every service works that is for the masses. As soon as you want a guaranteed 1000 tokens you should pay for that.

Just because all you can eat buffet exists doesn't mean that the food is free or you can take away the food. The food exists in discounted rate only if you consider it unlimited food. For normal folks they make profit.

Claude code could possibly make profit because the average usage doesn't come close to exhausting the limits.

> They could have just disabled Gemini access

Yes, please!

The facts are straightforward, even without analogies. But since we're using them...

You are at the grocery store, checking out. The total comes to $250. You pay, but then remember you had a coupon. You present it to the cashier, who calls the manager over. The manager informed you that you've attempted to use an expired coupon, which is a violation of Paragraph 53 subsection d of their Terms of Service. They keep your groceries and your $250, and they ban you from the store.

Google is acting here like it was entitled to a profitable transaction, and is even entitled to punish anyone who tries to make it a losing transaction. But they're not the police. No crime was committed.

Regular businesses win some and lose some. A store buys widgets for $10 and hopes to sell them for $20, but sometimes they miscalculate and have to unload them for $5. Overall they hope their winners exceed their losers. That's business.

Of course. That's why I personally don't use an ad blocker. I just close the tab if it's too annoying.

> TFA most commonly refers to Trifluoroacetic acid, a highly persistent, mobile "forever chemical" (PFAS) found globally in water and soil, widely used in organic chemistry as a solvent.

The irony is that web searches for an explanation of something often lead to a discussion thread where the poster is downvoted and berated for daring to ask people instead of Google. And then there's one commenter who actually actually explains the thing you were wondering about.

What about this ban is anticompetitive? The only think I can think of is accusing them of dumping product (as opposed to price discrimination), in which case the remedy is going to be to making them charge the API price for everything.

> this is an affront to the dignity of man

This right here is an insane take to the opposite direction. Abuse, violence, torture, war, oppression, these are affronts to the dignity of man. Being kicked off a service from one business is absolutely not. It’s an inconvenience, but does not determine whether you will have bodily integrity.

By this logic, eviction from an apartment is a torture regardless of what the tenant did.

> Tradition warrants a negotiation phase when one party wishes to change the terms of an agreement, or becomes cognizant that the counterparty may wish to do the same.

They didn't change the agreement. One party violated it, and the other party withdrew as a result.

This is so vanilla. But people will moan because they want subsidized tokens.

I don't think that's an apt metaphor. You bought one general water supply, like an API user. If they sold a "no baths" cheaper option I'd be fine with them banning baths to those customers.

Google's API does let you use any client.

The gemini/antigravity clients are a different (subscription) service. When you reverse engineer the clients and use their internal auth/apis you will typically have very different access patterns to other clients (eg: not using prompt caching), and this is likely showing up in their metrics.

This isn't unusual. A bottomless drink at a restaurant has restrictions: it's for you to drink, not to pass around to others at the table (unless they buy one too). You can't pour it into bottles to take large quantities home, etc. And it's priced accordingly: if sharing/bottling was allowed the price would have to increase.

Lmao no. You cannot use your common sim card for that. It's for an individual and they will cut your service and justifiably so, if they figure out that's what you're using it for.

If you buy a sim card built for that purpose sure, but then you'll be paying...biz prices!

This isn't really that hard to figure out people. So much outrage in comments on this. Self entitlement to the max from people who really haven't lifted a finger to stop the corporate overlords anyway.

Precisely. In fact I remember a story similar to this, so I Googled "did Sprint get sued for using 'unlimited' in their marketing?" Lo and behold, yes, they did. And for good reason.

It would be an understatement to say I am ashamed to work in the same industry as many of the commenters here do--commenters who are completely ignorant of antitrust law and why it exists, or for whatever reason, are completely unconcerned with the absurd market power these mega conglomerates (ab)use.