/* MINDFIRE BLOG */

Google has quietly chopped the Gemini API free tier down to size—and now it’s about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. Once upon a time, you could fire off 1,500 requests per day, but now Gemini 2.0 Flash free tier is capped at 200 requests per day (Google Rate Limits “Free Tier” table; previously 1,500/day according to Zapier: "Free up to 15 requests/min; 1M tokens/min; 1,500 requests/day")

Meanwhile, if you switch to Gemma—which on paper allows 30 requests per minute and a whopping 14,400 requests per day (Google Rate Limits “Gemma 3 & 3n” row)—you’ll still hit a ResourceExhausted error long before you approach those limits (Google Support).

I doubt I’m even burning through as many requests as Google claims. For example, my test script throws “ResourceExhausted” after just a handful of calls—despite staying well under the documented RPM and TPM caps. That means prototyping or smoke‑testing your app without buying tokens is now effectively impossible. Want to validate your UX? Better hand over your credit card. Moreover, you'll hit this Gemma limit even if you have a paid tier!

For anyone chasing budget‑friendly LLM options, it might be time to head back to Hugging Face or other open‑source alternatives. Because if Google won’t let you play in the sandbox for free, you’ll have to build your sandcastle elsewhere.

Other Related Links:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/78535824/why-does-my-code-send-429-quota-exceeds-on-google-gemini-api-with-generative-ui?utm_source=chatgpt.com
• https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/gemma-3-27b-rate-limits/73700?utm_source=chatgpt.com
• https://www.mindfiretechnology.com/blog/archive/writing-a-robust-do-it-all-gemini-api-caller-in-python/