New Getting A Gemini API Key Is An Exercise In Frustration 2025
Last week, I started working on a new side-project. It’s a standard React app partly made up of run-of-the-mill CRUD views—a perfect fit for LLM-assisted programming. I reasoned that if I could get an LLM to quickly write the boring code for me, I’d have more time to focus on the interesting problems I wanted to solve.
I’ve pretty much settled on Claude Code as my coding assistant of choice, but I’d been hearing great things about Google’s Gemini 3 Pro. Despite my aversion to Google products, I decided to try it out on my new codebase.
I already had Gemini CLI installed, but that only gave me access to Gemini 2.5 with rate limits. I wanted to try out Gemini 3 Pro, and I wanted to avoid being rate limited. I had some spare cash to burn on this experiment, so I went looking for ways to pay for a Gemini Pro plan, if such a thing existed.
Thus began my grand adventure in trying to give Google my money.
The name “Gemini” is so overloaded that it barely means anything. Based on the context, Gemini could refer to:
To make things even more confusing, Google has at least three different products just for agentic coding: Gemini Code Assist (Gemini CLI is a part of this suite of products), Jules, and Antigravity.
And then there’s a bunch of other GenAI stuff that is powered by Gemini but doesn’t have the word Gemini in the name: Vertex AI Platform, Google AI Studio, NotebookLM, and who knows what else.
I just wanted to plug my credit card information into a form and get access to a coding assistant. Instead, I was dunked into an alphabet soup of products that all seemed to do similar things and, crucially, didn’t have any giant “Buy Now!” buttons for me to click.
In contrast, both Anthropic and OpenAI have two primary ways you can access their products: via their consumer offerings at claude.ai and chatgpt.com respectively, or via API credits that you can buy through their respective developer consoles. In each case, there is a form field where you can plug in your credit card details, and a big, friendly “Buy Now!” button to click.
After half an hour of searching the web, I did the obvious thing and asked the free version of Gemini (the chatbot, not one of those other Geminis) what to do:
Source: HackerNews
