What your plan can use
Two different gates decide whether a capability works for you, and they are easy to mix up:
- Model access — your plan grants model tiers, separately for the Playground and for API keys.
- Rate limit (tpm) — tokens per minute. Large requests can exceed it on
their own, so a capability can be "allowed" and still fail with
429.
This page shows both, so you can tell before you write any code.
Capability by plan
| Capability | Playground | API key |
|---|---|---|
Chat — free model (gemini-3-flash-lite) | All plans | All plans |
| Chat — paid models | Starter and up | Pro and up |
| Image generation | Starter and up | Pro and up |
| Multimodal chat input (image / PDF / audio / video) | Starter and up | Pro and up |
| Embeddings — text, image | n/a | Pro and up |
| Embeddings — video | n/a | Pro and up, and see the note below |
| Text to speech (Preview) | n/a | Pro and up |
| Live voice (Beta) | Invite only | Not a public API |
| Web search | Starter and up | n/a |
Starter is a Playground plan. It unlocks every public model in the browser, paid from its $9.50 Playground credit — but an API key issued on Starter can only call the free model. Calling paid models from the API starts at Pro. See Subscription plans.
Signup bonus: while promotional bonus remains in your wallet, paid models are temporarily unlocked so you can try them from the API too. The restriction returns when the bonus is spent — it is a trial, not a plan entitlement.
Why video embedding needs Pro or above
A video is sent as base64, and base64 is token-expensive: roughly 929 tokens per KB. The current limits are 6 seconds and 300 KB per clip, so one legal request is worth about 279,000 tokens against your per-minute token budget.
| Plan | tpm | 300 KB video |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 12,000 | 429 |
| Starter | 60,000 | 429 |
| Pro | 300,000 | works |
| Enterprise | 1,000,000 | works |
The request is legal and the model allows it — it is the per-minute token limit that rejects it. Retrying does not help; use a key on a plan with enough tpm.
Live is invite-only
Live voice runs in the console Playground for whitelisted organizations only. There is no public realtime API, and organizations outside the whitelist have no entry point in the console. Contact us if you would like to be included in the beta.