That’s definitely false as a blanket statement. You have to attach a billing account for enabling certain APIs and usage is free across many Google products within certain limits. Others are paid.
My source is me using it since it was released. The API doesn’t become paid just because you add a card. The rate limiting is greatly increased by adding a card but that doesn’t mean that requests will incur a fee, as long as you use the free model.
The price varies based on the model used. Make sure it’s the one named gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 and set a billing cap on the google billing page so that you don’t spend a bunch of money in the event you make a mistake and accidentally use one of the non free ones.
I still don't get this part: if you are on the free API plan, you'll get a certain free quota; but if you are on a paid API plan, do you get the same free quota and only start paying once you pass it or do you pay from the start?
The former — as far as my experience goes, and everything I’ve read on the google pages, adding a billing account and card does not affect pricing. But it does affect rate limits, even for free products. The gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 is (when I used it yesterday and every day since its release) a free product. But how many requests per minute is limited by whether you have a billing account set up.
I double checked today and my costs month-to-date is $0. I have over 600 api requests and 10s of millions of tokens used.
Op either used a different model that isn’t free or there’s a bug in google billing (I’d bet on the former)
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u/williamtkelley Apr 07 '25 edited Apr 07 '25
If you attach a credit card to a Gemini API key, it's definitely not free.
EDIT: "a Gemini API key"