hermes-skills/skills/devops/model-failover-and-credit-tracking/references/gemini-quota-exhaustion.md

Gemini API Quotas & Rate Limits (Jul 10, 2026)

Google Gemini API Key — 250 Requests/Day Hard Limit

The Gemini API key used through admin-ai (LiteLLM) has a hard daily limit of 250 requests. This applies to:

• gemini-pro-latest (used for subagents, vision, and some direct calls)
• gemini-3.1-pro (same quota pool)
• Vision/image analysis requests count against the same quota

Error pattern: 429 RESOURCE_EXHAUSTED — Quota exceeded for metric: generativelanguage.googleapis.com/generate_requests_per_model_per_day, limit: 250

When it happens: After ~250 total requests across all consumers (subagents, vision, direct API calls). Typically exhausts mid-afternoon on heavy usage days.

Recovery: Quota resets at midnight UTC. Retry delay from error: ~7.5 hours.

Mitigations

1. Subagents use deepseek-v4-pro — avoids Gemini's 250/day cap entirely
2. Cron jobs use Ollama (llama3.2:3b) for low-end tasks — free, no quota
3. Vision falls back to text-only when Gemini is exhausted — describe what you need instead
4. Monitor usage via admin-ai's spend dashboard

Quota vs Credits

This is a request count quota, NOT a credit balance issue. Topping up credits won't fix it. The fix is:

• Upgrade Google API plan for higher daily limits
• Or route vision through a different provider (Anthropic's Claude vision, OpenAI's GPT-4o vision)
• Or accept the 250/day cap and manage usage accordingly