The Gemini AI Studio "Context Tax": How a 10-word prompt cost me £121 7 by daitandojo | 0 comments on Hacker News. I’ve been utilizing Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro via the AI Studio front-end to develop a new platform. The 1M+ context window is, technically speaking, a game-changer for "stitching" together a 55,000-line codebase. However, I recently discovered a predatory billing architecture that I’m calling the "Context Tax." If you use the AI Studio UI, you might be walking into a massive bill without a single warning. Here is how it happened, and the UK/EU privacy "pro-tip" I found in the fine print. In AI Studio, you start on the Free Tier. You upload your codebase (say, 700k tokens) and work for free until you hit the daily quota. At that point, the UI suggests adding an API key to "continue the conversation." The Trap: Most users (myself included) assume that after adding the key, they will be billed for incremental usage (the 10-1...