> I get the feeling GCP is not good for individuals like I.
Google isn't good for individuals at all. Unless you've got a few million followers or get lucky on HN, support is literally non-existent. Anyone that builds a business on Google is nuts.
I'd like to state the AWS, in contrast, has been great to me as an individual. The two times that I needed to speak to a human, I had one on the phone resolving my issue. And both issues were due to me making mistakes - on my small personal account.
Yes, it’s extremely complicated. I gave up on fire base for one project because I could not figure out how to get the right permissions set up and my support request resulted in someone copying and pasting a snippet from the instructions that I obviously had not understood in the first place.
It’s also extremely cumbersome to sign up for Google AI. The other day I tried to get deep seek working via Google’s hosted offering and gave up after about an hour. The form just would not complete without error and there was not a useful message to work with.
It would seem that in today’s modern world of AI assistance, Google could set up one that would help users do the simplest things. Why not just let the agent direct the user to the correct forms and let the user press submit?
Oh man, I've been playing with GCP's vertex AI endpoints, and this is so representative of my experience. It's actually bananas how difficult it is, even compared to other GCP endpoints
Please allow me to rant to someone who can actually do something about this.
Vertex AI has been a nightmare to simply sign up, link a credit card, and start using Claude Sonnet (now available on Vertex AI).
The sheer number of steps required for this (failed) user journey is dizzying:
* AI Studio, get API key
* AI Studio, link payment method: Auto-creates GCP property, which is nice
* Punts to GCP to actually create the payment method and link to GCP property
* Try to use API key in Claude Code; need to find model name
* Look around to find actual model name, discover it is only deployed on some regions, thankfully, the property was created on the correct region
* Specify the new endpoint and API key, Claude Code throws API permissions errors
* Search around Vertex and find two different places where the model must be provisioned for the account
* Need to fill out a form to get approval to use Claude models on GCP
* Try Claude Code again, fails with API quota errors
* Check Vertex to find out the default quota for Sonnet 4.5 is 0 TPM (why is this a reasonable default?)
* Apply for quota increase to 10k tokens/minute (seemingly requires manual review)
* Get rejection email with no reasoning
* Apply for quota increase to 1 token/minute
* Get rejection email with no reasoning
* Give up
Then I went to Anthropic's own site, here's what that user journey looks like:
* console.anthropic.com, get API key
* Link credit card
* Launch Claude Code, specify API key
* Success
I don't think this is even a preferential thing with Claude Code, since the API key is working happily in OpenCode as well.