As the article states, generating the key itself is easy. But getting credit and billing are the issues.

I have it running and calling but it's not showing the usage and I set it up the day gemini 3 came out

You can check your usage, inclusive of Gemini 3 here: https://aistudio.google.com/usage?timeRange=last-28-days just make sure you have the right project selected

Agree, Google made it really easy here, compared to using service account certificates like with some of their other APIs.