Gemini API
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“this was the exact reason why I switched to Gemini API from OpenAI. OAI would make me wait up to 10 minutes for the first token”
“I use the Gemini and Mistral API free tiers. I have a Gemini paid API account.”
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“I think that’s generally a fair price for my time vs doing my own search queries at 1/100th the speed.”
Caveats and dissent
“the API constantly spew 503 errors. This was so bad that I switched to OpenAI API instead.”
“First headache was a lot of delays and 'service unavailable due to excessive load messages'.”
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“Google's own statements are extremely clear that”
“Why are we hearing about this again?”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“it is google/genai going forward.”
Threads where it came up
- €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs 7 mentions
- Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration 7 mentions
- Gemini 4 Argon 2 mentions
- OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race 2 mentions
- item 50261220 1 mention
- Gemini 3.7 Flash 1 mention
Data: gemini-api.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 31
“optional live AI interpretation powered by the Gemini API”
“the API constantly spew 503 errors. This was so bad that I switched to OpenAI API instead.”
“this was the exact reason why I switched to Gemini API from OpenAI. OAI would make me wait up to 10 minutes for the first token”
“Spend caps can now be set”
“First headache was a lot of delays and 'service unavailable due to excessive load messages'.”
“I use the Gemini and Mistral API free tiers. I have a Gemini paid API account.”
“Yes https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#spend-caps”
That mutually exclusive with our originating comment you think?: "...I always paid for the resources I used. Just because you consume a lot of resources by accident that doesn't mean you shouldn't have to pay for it."
“We have spend caps at the billing account level and the project level (developer set) in the Gemini API now.”
That's actually crazy. So I can build a project I love, that does good, but somehow get in a situation where I'm accidentally paying 30.000€ (or 50.000€) to a big tech company? How is that fair? I mean yes, as a software engineer, you ought to reflect on all possible weaknesses, but there was a time when overlooking something meant something completely different than being down 30/50k. That is actually life-altering.
“Google's own statements are extremely clear that”
“The Gemini API supports monthly spend caps at both the billing account tier and project levels.”
“Why are we hearing about this again?”
“Considering the amount of repositories on public GitHub with hard-coded Gemini API tokens”
“https://blog.barrack.ai/google-gemini-api-key-vulnerability/”
“Google acknowledged it as a P2 bug, still open.”
“generates visualisations using the Gemini API”
“ran out of TPM quota from Google Cloud's Gemini API”
“Is there some theoretical risk that someone could get their hands on my Gemini API key?”
you should try figuring out all Google products where you can generate images and videos, even attempt to learn how they work, how does billing work, where it uses credits from or API costs charged to where, what are the differences between all the weirdly named products (AI Studio, Vertex, Whisk, ImageFX, Veo Studio, Flow, etc.) with seemingly overlaping purposes the product description of Whisk at https://labs.goog
“Built with TanStack Start, Recharts, and Gemini API.”
“Consider using structured output.”
“abstracting calls across three different APIs (openai, gemini and mistral”
“I wasted several hours this week going around in the exact same circles.”
Having moved from one country to another, I tripped all kinda of anti fraud systems and the only way out was to share my ID with every other company. It’s annoying but one common thing is that anti fraud systems seem to require humans in the loop, so it’s better to give up and get back to it next day. The most annoying company I dealt with was Blizzard. I just wanted to play a game but it took days of back and forth,
“The specified schema produces a constraint that has too many states for serving.”
“I don't understand the multiple posts / comments I've seen about this.”
“Might work if you set media resolution to high”
“Grounding with Google Search has extremely restrictive terms of use.”
“I think that’s generally a fair price for my time vs doing my own search queries at 1/100th the speed.”
“I had to figure out how to do it with Gemini API instead”