Account locked out of Free Tier and returning 429 after deleting paid project (Mar 30, 2026)
A reported account-state bug on the Google AI Developer forums describes a user who deleted a Tier 1 paid project and subsequently had all Free Tier API keys become unavailable and return Status 429 (Resource Exhausted). Cloud Billing support reportedly closed a related case and forum participants requested engineering intervention to reset account state. The issue prevents creation of new purely free projects and forces billing linkage for new keys.