Where to find Gemini cost breakdown

When using Gemini API, you need basic daily statistics about token usage and cost in order to optimize your spending. These statistics do exist, but finding them is a real challenge.

LLM-focused companies like OpenAI and Anthropic give you a clean, concise dashboard. You can explore it entirely in a few minutes to find what you need. Google, being a generic cloud company, has a vast landscape of dashboards and reports. You could spend several days exploring it. Nobody has time for that.

The first place you look in is the AI Studio, because that's where you have obtained your Gemini API key. AI Studio does have usage and billing reports, but those are way too basic. They look like a quick demo of a future reports implementation. They wouldn't tell you usage and cost by token type.

Then there's the Billing dashboard in Cloud Console that is linked from AI Studio. That one is overwhelming, but it does contain the information if you know where to look. You have to select Reports in the menu on the left, click on Group by above the chart, and select SKU grouping. That will show you token count and cost grouped by token type and model. Hovering over the chart will also give you cost breakdown for given day. It's not as usable as OpenAI and Anthropic dashboards, but it's good enough to control and optimize total spending, input-output token ratio, and prompt caching.

If you are an enterprise that already extensively uses Google cloud and you know your way around the Cloud Console, then you wouldn't mind. But if you just want the Gemini API, hiding cost breakdown like this feels borderline scammy. If you are in the second group, my recommendation is to avoid Gemini unless you really need it.