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Comment by rozap | Hacker News Reader

I wasted several hours this week going around in the exact same circles. We have a billing account, but kept hitting a gemini quota. Fine. But then on the quota page, every quota said 0% usage. And our bill was like $5. Some docs said check AI studio, but then the "import project from google cloud to AI studio" button kept silently failing. This was a requests per minute quota, which was set at 15 (not a whole lot...) but wouldn't reset for 24 hours. So then I kept making new projects so I could keep testing this thing I'm building, until eventually I ran out.

The only way we could get it resolved was to (somehow) get a real human at google on the phone because we're in some startup program or something and have some connection there. Then he put in a manual request to bump our quota up.

Google cloud is the most kafkaesque insane system I've ever had the misfortune of dealing with. Every time I use it I can tell the org chart is leaking.

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For the last decade or so I get a second $0.85 monthly bill from google. Nobody at google knows why, but they recommend to leave it because who knows what could be disabled if I block those payments. Interesting detail here is that this is on a bank account that we stopped using in 2017, so the only reason we are keeping that account alive is for these stupid google payments. In the cloud environment there is an invoice for the amounts, but no way to change the billing info to our current account and also no way (not by us, not by google support) to figure out what these payments are actually for...

Calling it kafkaesque is giving it too much credit.

I recently got an email saying a project I got is at the risk of being disabled because my payment information is invalid. But the card I got registered for it is the same I've had the last two years, and it's still valid cause I used it yesterday. Also, there is no amount due as far as I can tell. I haven't done anything with the project for 6 month, it's just sitting there. No API usage, nothing.

So I got no idea what to do to address it. I feel my best option is wait for it to get disabled and try to address it afterwards.

Chargebacks or disputes will lock your account, so definitely stay away from that path.

But just closing the bank account will stop auto billing (it's considered a decline). So if you closed the account, it would just stop paying for whatever it is, and then cloud may lock the gcp account until it's paid. (I'm not 100% sure what cloud does with unpaid invoices).

I have been fighting the same bizarre quota demon. Scripts kept timing out due to quota limitations, but I haven't been able to find any indication of a limit in the console. Finally gave up and switched to Claude, since they at least have a sane interface for API keys and billing!

Exactly the same for me. Quote usage is something like 2%, but constantly experience the quota limit error.

The trick here is that they describe internal loadshedding as quota limits.

There’s a quote for your general class of query, and there’s a quota for how many can be in flight on a given server. It’s not necessarily about you specifically.

That should not be the case, if so it is a bug, if we load shed (which does happen some what frequently given the demand our systems are under) we should be returning a 503, not 429. If you suspect something is amiss and you get a 429 even though your limits don't show it in https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days&tab..., pls email me: Lkilpatrick@google.com

This was the vibe I got, that they were actually just load shedding but writing it as a 429 with a message about the quota being hit. And if they need to load shed, fine, I get it, but it is a waste of time for me to go in circles trying to figure out wtf is wrong when they're just too cowardly to admit it because it might impact whatever SLA some PM has.

It just leaves a bad taste, and the second a competitor comes along that has an acceptable offering, then I'll move. Just ridiculous gaslighting behavior.

We built a new rate limit and quota experience right inside Google AI Studio, along with a way to see your details logs: https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days&tab...

pls send feedback if this is helpful!

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