Google does not want your money, they don’t know how to count so low
https://youtu.be/3t6L-FlfeaI (2010)
To be fair, a lot of this changed after that video became a meme.. but I'd bet that the broccoli man template is still trending on memegen
Googlers tend to exist in an isolated bubble. In the corporate world, Azure is the default and they have Azure OpenAI. Why would someone bother with Gemini? Unless the devs at companies have a good experience with it of course.
Googlers are awesome/mean well, if only enough of them lurked here :)
I actually do agree that Vercel's admin screens are quite good compared to the other usual suspects. But I don't consider that to be on the development side of things. It's done decently well because it is geared towards the business folks who are paying the bills.
Developers writing code on top of the development solutions produced by Vercel have been completely forsaken.
They absolutely deserve credit for their free tier API keys though. That's unheard of in big cloud - an actual you can't shoot yourself in the foot with a life ruining bill thing. Can't recall what part of their product maze I got it from but it seems to do what it says on tin
-
And I guess to add some context, it's because Google seemingly realized that Google Cloud moves so glacially slow, and has so much baggage, that they could no longer compete with scrappier startups like OpenAI and Anthropic on developer mindshare.
So there's a separate product org that owns AI Studio, which tries to be more nimble, and probably 50x'd Gemini adoption by using API Keys instead of Service Accounts and JSON certs that take mapping out the 9th circle of hell to deploy in some environments. (although iirc Vertex now has those)
They definitely do ship faster than Google Cloud, but their offerings actually end up feeling like a product team with fewer resources than OpenAI or Anthropic (like shipping purple tailwind-slop UIs as real features), which is just nuts.
I remember multiple waiting periods, and multiple requirements to cross spend thresholds to increase in tiers. I remember at one point spamming the OpenAI API with garbage just to consume credits in order to get to the next tier to increase rate limits.
More recently (couple months ago) I tried using a 3rd party client for ChatGPT which needed a OpenAI API key. I gave up after 20 mins.
How can you have any tokens if you haven’t finished your tokens?!
I have a friend that says Google's decline came when they bought DoubleClick in 2008 and suffered a reverse-takeover: their customers shifted from being Internet users and became other, matchingly-sized corporations.
One of my co-workers left with an active account and active card but no passwords noted. The company gave up and just had to cancel + create a new account for the next adwords specialist.
I read someone on here who is using Gemini via OpenRouter because it was the only way they could pay for it.
Even with something as simple as google workspace - permissioning service accounts and authentication are a pain in the ass
The docs suck and of course there’s no one to help
athrowaway3z•1h ago
My fucking god, how has Google not flagged the failure of onboarding devs like Claude / Codex?
3 days ago I was literally thinking, I want to throw 20$ to try out Gemini alongside my Claude and Codex subs.
It took me a few minutes to realize its just not worth my time to figure out how.
mox1•11m ago
Holy Crap, I got about 45 minutes into setting up billing and just gave up and un-did everything.
Hint: If you want to put a spending Limit on your google cloud account, its not trivial.
I will say that Stability AI is similar to Claude, they will just let you buy credits and hit an API.