As the other comments pointed out, that's not covering billing...

But also the (theoretical) production platform for Gemini is Vertex AI, not AI Studio.

And until pretty recently using that took figuring out service accounts, and none of Google's docs would demonstrate production usage.

Instead they'd use the gcloud CLI to authenticate, and you'd have to figure out how each SDK consumed a credentials file.

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Now there's "express mode" for Vertex which uses an API Key, so things are better, but the complaints were well earned.

At one point there were even features (like using a model you finetuned) that didn't work without gcloud depending on if you used Vertex or AI Studio: https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/how-can-i-use-fine-tuned-mod...