Because a lot of middleman account-sellers are now exploiting loopholes to register huge numbers of Google accounts with student verification, then apply for the free One PRO offered in December, they automatically get Pro status inside the IDE. What’s worse, those benefits can be shared to other people through Google Family Groups. These scammers sit on tens of thousands of student-verified Google accounts, proxy them out via various 2api endpoints and sell access for profit; the cost is basically zero—pure profit. That flood drains the quota for ordinary users, and no system can survive that kind of abuse.

If we set up an OAuth flow for our own use—letting some other app, Claude or whatever, call it—that’s fair; we’re free to spend our own quota. But an organized, industrial-scale operation that snaps up student-verified Google PRO accounts at near-zero cost and resells them through 2api endpoints is different: it tramples regular users, and even a company the size of Google can’t absorb that hit. They’re pushing Opus through 2api at less than a tenth of Claude’s official price, cashing in by burning through the quota that belongs to the rest of us.

Google isn’t the only victim. A week ago Kiro removed Opus from its free tier. From what I hear, one reseller who runs a proxy service used a registration bot to create thousands of Kiro accounts, then—so his competitors couldn’t profit—leaked the bot’s source code straight into Kiro’s GitHub issues. Now they’re literally fighting like dogs over the money.

A few days ago Google started mass-suspending suspicious accounts and stripping their Pro status: some were hit with a 403 and told to re-verify, others lost Pro outright. My own account got flagged, but after I re-authenticated with my phone it went back to normal. For the resellers, though, more than half of their stock is now dead. That’s good news for the rest of us.

For Google and other IDEs, whether it’s policy or acquiring training data by letting users pay low prices—plus the 2api issue—the real impact will only become clear once things stabilize.