Maybe the team should push hard before releasing the product instead of after to make it work.
"Move fast and break things" cuts both ways !
(ex-Google tech lead, who took down the Google.com homepage... twice!)
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.
Apart from the fact that what happens to the money when it gets to google (putting it in the right accounts, in the right business, categorizing it, etc), it changes depending on who you're ASKING for money.
1. Getting money from an individual is easy. Here's a credit card page.
2. Getting money from a small business is slightly more complicated. You may already have an existing subscription (google workspaces), just attach to it.
3. As your customers get bigger, it gets more squishy. Then you have enterprise agreements, where it becomes a whole big mess. There are special prices, volume discounts, all that stuff. And then invoice billing.
The point is that yes, we all agree that getting someone to plop down a credit card is easy. Which is why Anthropic and OpenAI (who didn't have 20 years of enterprise billing bloat) were able to start with the simplest use case and work their way slowly up.
But I AM sensitive to how hard this is for companies as large and varied as Google or MS. Remember the famous Bill Gates email where even he couldn't figure out how to download something from Microsoft's website.
It's just that they are also LARGE companies, they have the resources to solve these problems, just don't seem to have the strong leadership to bop everyone on the head until they make the billing simple.
And my guess is also that consumers are such a small part of how they're making money (you best believe that these models are probably beautifully integrated into the cloud accounts so you can start paying them from day one).
If they do, it's failing here. The idea of a penny pinching megacorp like Google failing technically even in the penny pinching arena is a surprise to me.
From past experience, the advertising side of the business was very clear with accounts and billing. GCP was a whole other story. The entire thing was poorly designed, very confusing, a total mess. You really needed some justification to be using it over almost everything else (like some Google service which had to go through GCP.) It's kind of like an anti-sales team where you buy one thing because you have to and know you never want to touch anything from the brand ever again.
It doesn't need to be good. It just need to be not broken.
Especially for software developer and tech influencer focused markets.
Take that how you will.
This is in a $3.6 Trillion company, for a product they're spending billions a quarter to develop, with specialized employees making mid 6-figure to 7-figure salaries and bonuses... you'd think somebody has the right connections into the departments that typically handle the payment systems.
My expectations shoot up dramatically for organizations that have all the funding they need to create something "insanely great" in terms of user experience the further they fall short... I don't know who the head of this group/project/department/product is... but someone failed at their job, and got payed excessively for this poor execution.