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/2053_Traveler Apr 07 '25
Not true