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.
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.
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.