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Agree 1,000%.

I just won’t even waste my time with the google stuff cuz I can’t figure out how to pay with it.

And that’s a problem everywhere at google. Our google play account is suspended cuz I can’t verify the company. It won’t let me cuz it says I’m not the owner. I’ve always been the owner of my company. For 18 years. There is no one else.

Once some error said make sure the owner email matches your profile in google payments and I was like, what is google payments and where do I even begin with that? I’ve never paid for google play so what does payments have to do with anything?

It’s totally random stuff. Get your shit together, google. Make your products and payment systems coherent, rather than it obviously looking like it was designed by a fiefdom full of territorial managers.

The "Owner" accounts in Google Play and Apple's App Store are so freaking annoying. The only time they make sense is for solo-founders and even then I've had issues. Now expand it to working at a larger company and it's a joke, a bad one. Oh sure, I'll just get the CEO (or other higher-up) to login and accept new agreements, that will be easy. Even more fun when you tell a client (who logged in exactly 1 time to set up the account) that they need to use a generic email (not a personal one or an employee-specific one), the ignore your suggestion, and then they can't get back in because the person who set up the account left the company. It's a mess.

Also, re "Google Payments", I tried to transfer an app from my personal/solo Google Play account to a new business one I set up for my LLC and it was like pulling teeth. They wanted me to find some payment id from the original $20 purchase I made to get access to Google Play, something I did right around when they first launched and while I still have/use the same email, Google came out with approximately 1 googol different "payment solutions" in the interim and their engineers don't care about data migrations. Finally, after many support emails, they just transferred it without me giving that code which just shows how silly the whole thing was from the start.

I don’t have experience in big tech but in the few SaaS companies I’ve seen the issue is UX designers and Product managers overwhelmingly have a B2C culture.

Can relate. My inactive google ads account all of a sudden got banned. No explanation except some generic link to their terms of service. Appealed, got automatic denial, no reason given. Have retried multiple times, same result

Same thing happened to me. Guess who didn’t start spending $100 a month with them again?

Utterly ridiculous.

> designed by a fiefdom full of territorial managers

What's harder than herding cats? Herding cats with MBAs and OKRs.

> what is google payments

YES I had this and eventually fixed it. I really don't know what I did but lots of clicking on random links and signing into things in different orders and then one day it somehow worked.

So frustrating.

Conway’s Law strikes again.

Couldn't agree more about the google product offerings. Vertex AI? AI Studio? Maker studio? Gemini? The documentation is fragmented with redundant offerings making it confusing to determine what is what. GCS billing is complicated to figure out vs OpenAI billing or anthropic.

Sad part is Google does offer a ChatML/OpenAI compliant endpoint to do LLM calls and I believe they in an experiment also reduced friction in getting an API key to start making calls right away but discoverability ever remains a challenge with google services.

> I believe they in an experiment also reduced friction in getting an API key to start making calls right away

This part is very easy now: you sign into https://aistudio.google.com/ and then click "Get API key" in the lower left corner.

The problem is that features and docs are still scattered all over. Some thing can only be done via Vertex, for example.

Not if you’re signed into two accounts and you want to use the one that Google doesn’t choose first and the one that Google chooses first cannot accept the AI Studio terms. You get stuck behind a non-dismissible modal and a blurred out page.

I've just found myself using OpenRouter if we need Google models for a project, it's worth the extra 5% just not to have to deal with the utter disaster that is their product offering.

FWIW I had to bail on the same thing because my results were drastically different. There was something happening with images through open router. Although outside of that I’d absolutely do the same thing, their apis are awful and billing worse. Maybe it makes sense for huge orgs but it’s a nightmare on the smaller scale.

Google keeps changing their privacy and “don’t train on my data/code” options. When gemini-cli launched, there was a clear toggle for “don’t train on my code.” That’s now gone; it just links to a generic privacy page for me. Maybe something with my account changed, I can't figure it out. Deep in the Cloud Gemini console, there’s another setting that might control training, but it’s not clear what products it actually covers.

Trying to pay for Gemini-3 is confusing. Maybe an AI Ultra personal subscription? I already pay for OpenAI and Anthropic’s pro/max plans and would happily pay Google too. But the only obvious option is a $250/month tier, and its documentation indicates Google can train on your code unless you find and enable the correct opt-out. If that opt-out exists in all the products, it’s not obvious where it lives or what products it applies to.

Workspace complicates it further. Google advertises that with business workspace accounts your data isn’t used for training. So, I was going to try Antigravity on our codebase. At this point I know I can't trust Google, so I read the ToS carefully. They train on your prompts and source code, and there doesn't appear to be a way to pay them and opt out right now. Be careful, paying for Google Workspace does not protect you, always read the ToS.

Be careful with AI-studio and your Google Workspace accounts. They train on your prompts unless you switch it to API mode.

The result is a lot of uncertainty. I genuinely have no idea how to pay Google for Gemini without risking my code being used for training. And if I do pay, I can’t tell whether they’ll train on my prompts anyway.

The marketing for their coding products does not clearly state when they do or do not train on your prompts and code.

I had to run deep research to understand the risks with using Gemini 3 for agentic work, and I still don't feel confident that I understand the risks. I might have said some incorrect things above, but I am just so confused. I feel like I have a <75% grasp on the situation.

I don't have a lot of trust. And honestly, this feels confusing and deceptive. One could easily confuse it as deliberate strategy to gather training data through ambiguity and dark patterns, it certainly looks like this could be Google's strategy to win the AI race. I assume this is just how it looks, and that they aren't being evil on purpose.

OpenAI in particular has my trust. They get it. They are carefully building the customer experience, they are product and customer driven from the top.

Personal antigravity hack: add a GPL license to every file, so google filters them before training to avoid legal complications. IANAL.

>OpenAI in particular has my trust.

I wouldn't trust Sam Altman. Or any of the big players really.

> trust

Hahaha...HAHAhaha. HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

At this point I’m not convinced that Gemini 3 Pro was post-trained on data Google had permission to use, going by the myriad of issues on the Gemini CLI tracker around Google AI/Google One/Google Cloud/Google Workspaces.

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/12121

It is far too easy to accidentally end up under the wrong privacy agreement, to the point of where some workplaces are banning use of the Gemini CLI!

> Claude: they barely have a signin system at all. Multiple account support doesn’t exist. The minimum seat count for business is nonsense. The data retention policies are weak.

Please give me an option for a password (or passkey) or literally anything else that doesn't require either linking with google or going through an email flow for every login

ZDR is a risk thing for them. They want to make sure you're a legitimate company and have monitoring in place on your side to reduce the chance you're using them for illegal things.

Adding to this, Google's models can only be used with GCP while OpenAI's models can be used with Azure, Anthropic's models can be used with AWD Bedrock, in addition to their own platforms.

I'd love to see the Gemini models being available by other providers :) or if they just build a simple prepaid wallet like OpenAI and Anthropic.

Didn't realize these stipulations for the models. Looking at devops-y job descriptions the last few months I noticed nearly everyone has some kind of Azure requirement now (which I've mostly avoided because I don't want to end up managing someone's AD), but is openai the actual reason for it?

We're just using Github Copilot as our primary entrypoint for all of the model families. Its the only way we can easily offer our devs some level of Claude, Gemini, and Codex all in one place.

Copilot has gotten a lot better lately at least on insiders. They are actually serving close to 200k context on insiders last I checked, which brings it more online with the first party apis

It seems pretty clear the moat is built at the application layer, how enjoyable/easy the actual application is to use, but these applications seem to be getting worse over time even as the models get better. Is it really that hard to do both? Isn’t the point of agentic coding to do more better (not just more)?

Its the same with Cursor. As a Cursor Admin I want the ability to enable only specific models and disable the rest to save costs but I cannot do that. It should be pretty simple to do it but for some reason Cursor wont add that functionality in their Admin tools.

Google listen to this man and fire 90% of your useless product managers!

Last night, just after Gemini 3 was released and became available for Gemini-CLI, I saw Gemini-CLI's team post that you could access Gemini 3 with either an API key OR with _Gemini AI Ultra_, so I thought: great, I'll get that!

Now you CAN NOT get the Google One stuff if your account is part of a workspace. I thought: how awful. I want to pay, but I simply can't?

Oh, but then I noticed: You CAN add a _Gemini AI Ultra_ license via the Google Workspace Admin area, great!

Turns out: you fucking can't. That's _Google AI Ultra FOR BUSINESS_ and that IS NOT supported.

So I had to get the Google One subscription on my personal account after all.

Combine that with the _pathetic_ usage limits: somehow not token-based, but amount of requests per 24 hour window (which is 500 for Gemini 3) and Gemini 3's incredible chattiness (it uses A LOT more requests to get something done compared to Claude) and you hit the usage limits in just 2 hours.

Careful, their ToS makes it clear they train on your Antigravity prompts (even on AI Ultra) and there is no opt-out that I can find.

the microsoftication of Google. Fighting evil with evil...

And stop asking for phone numbers for "fraud prevention" when I've already given you my name, address and credit card.

The fun one for me is that I moved countries and last I checked there’s still no way to change your phone number on ChatGPT short making a new account, so now my account is associated with a phone number that I no longer have access to and will eventually be reassigned to someone else.

Can't people spoof the first two and use a stolen credit card number?

pretty sure the serious companies are just using claude through bedrock. let anthropic handle the model, outsource the rest

Such great case studies of how LLM coding will make all of your employees 1000x more productive at coding, design, and UX. They really are leading the way showing us into the brighter future of AI software /s

Nobody claimed AIs will make office politics go away.

Peering into my crystal ball: once all "workers" have been replaced, all humans will spend all of their working hours on nothing but office politics.