What does the GCP project need for Applane?

Who

GCP admin: owner or editor on the project

Time

5 minutes to check

Applane calls Google APIs from the employee’s browser with the employee’s own token. Google checks API enablement on the project that owns the OAuth client, and bills Vertex AI to that project. So you need one project, with three properties.

Property	Why	How to check
It sits inside your Google Workspace organisation	The OAuth consent screen can only be Internal for a project that belongs to an organisation. Internal is what removes Google’s app verification.	gcloud projects describe <GCP_PROJECT_ID> --format='value(parent.type,parent.id)' prints organization or folder. A project with no parent must be moved or replaced.
Billing is linked	Vertex AI refuses every request on a project without a billing account, even inside the free tier.	gcloud billing projects describe <GCP_PROJECT_ID> --format='value(billingEnabled)' prints True.
You are owner or editor	Enabling APIs and granting IAM need serviceusage.services.enable and resourcemanager.projects.setIamPolicy.	gcloud projects get-iam-policy <GCP_PROJECT_ID> --flatten=bindings --filter="bindings.members:$(gcloud config get-value account)" --format='value(bindings.role)'

An existing project is fine. The setup tools only add what is missing: five APIs, one IAM grant, an optional budget alert. Nothing is deleted or changed. If a platform team already runs Vertex AI in a project, that project is the natural choice.

What it costs

Google bills Gemini tokens to this project at list price. Applane adds no AI usage fee and never sees the bill.

In our own testing, a full day of building used $0.59 of Gemini tokens; that is the only number we have measured. Your usage depends on how many builders you have and how much they build. The budget alert is the control; the default it creates is 50 in the billing account’s currency per month, with alerts at 50%, 90% and 100%.

Apps Script, Sheets, Drive and Docs have no per-call charge for Workspace users. What Vertex AI bills, and how the extension’s context caching cuts it, is on Model cost.

What you will create

Resource	What
Five enabled APIs	script, aiplatform, sheets, drive, docs (.googleapis.com). The five APIs
One IAM binding	roles/aiplatform.user to the builders group. IAM
One budget (optional)	Alerts only; nothing is cut off. Budget alerts
One consent screen	Internal, your own app name. OAuth consent screen
One OAuth client	Web application, two redirect URIs. OAuth client

No service accounts, no keys, no buckets, no queues. Start with Set up the project.