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Oh it’s worse than that. There are places where you CAN set a limit. This seems great until you are at the center of a huge traffic spike because of good pr and so you try to change it to a larger number only to be told you need to wait 24 hours for the setting to change.

Biggest traffic day of the decade and our site was down because of google.

You prepay for tokens exactly like the OpenAI/Anthropic dev dashboards when using AI Studio, which the link above is pointing to not GCP, also there are project specific spend caps now.

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#spend-caps

You are right; last time I tried it I used the cloud console as I needed gemini with the places tool included. However:

"Experimental: The feature is experimental and limited in scope. You are subject to overages for around a 10 minute latency period."

Why in 2026 can't Google do a database lookup in real time? This is so ridiculous.

Spend caps can now be set https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-...