It honestly does feel like astroturfing. I use Gemini models across a range of client and personal projects, in AI Studio and GCP and they just work.

Maybe it's a b2b vs b2c thing.

I can tell you that I have a Gemini plus subscription I still don't have anything more recent than 3.6 Flash. In consequence, I never use Gemini anymore, and instead have a PAYG plan on Deep Infra.

So, no, it is not astroturfing.

Yep, seriously. We live in a world where OpenAI and Anthropic each have about 60 different products named with variations of "Codex"/"ChatGPT" or "Claude", on top of a model matrix of about 100 different choices of name/version/reasoning level/variant. But somehow Google's comparatively streamlined offerings are impossibly confusing for HN to understand.

"How do I even pay for it?" is particularly baffling to me considering it's literally just included in their normal range of Google One subscriptions that bundle Drive/etc which have been around for years.

You pick a plan and pay for it, and sign in to whichever app you're using like Gemini chat (ChatGPT/Claude Chat) or Antigravity (Codex/Claude Code).

https://one.google.com/about/

AI Studio is the developer console (OpenAI Platform/Claude Platform). Vertex AI is the Google Cloud enterprise platform (using GPT or Claude models via AWS Bedrock/Azure AI Foundry).

Pretty much every product is a 1:1 equivalent with the same offering from OpenAI/Anthropic + Azure/AWS. Google is both a hyperscaler and an AI lab, so the venn diagram includes both the direct OpenAI/Anthropic products and what they also serve for enterprises via Azure/AWS.

I get that Google does bad stuff and isn't popular on HN which is understandable, but the specific criticisms really don't make sense. The entire AI developer/consumer space is messy and confusing but that's an industry wide complaint not specific to Google unless they should just not compete on certain verticals.