Setting a Token Budget Per Free User: Balancing AdMob Revenue Against AI Feature Cost
Rate limits protect requests per minute. They do nothing for the invoice that arrives at the end of the month. Here is how I derive a per-user token budget from ad revenue, keep the ledger inside a single call wrapper, degrade gracefully at a soft cap, and detect abuse with one concentration ratio.
Don't make Gemini judge your AdMob report — confine structured output to extraction
When deciding AdMob floors (eCPM thresholds), letting Gemini make the decision itself is dangerous. Confine structured output to 'extracting a messy report into typed data,' and keep the threshold judgment in deterministic code — here is the reasoning and implementation, with the actual decision rules from running 42 groups.
Measuring the Economics of Each Gemini-Powered Feature — So You Can Keep It, Fix It, or Retire It
Gemini API costs are visible at the account level, but the profitability of an individual feature never shows up on its own. This guide shows how to tag every request, build a per-feature cost ledger, join it with revenue signals from AdMob and in-app purchases to compute contribution margin, and decide whether to keep, fix, or retire each feature — with the code I actually run.
Three Weeks of Running Gemini 3 Pro and 2.5 Pro Side by Side on Wallpaper Category Classification — An Implementation Memo
Notes from running Gemini 3 Pro and 2.5 Pro in parallel for three weeks on the image classification pipeline of my iOS and Android wallpaper apps — cost, accuracy, and latency observations from an indie developer.
Letting Gemini Flash Decide continue / pause / rollback for Staged Rollouts: An Indie Developer's Three-Signal Engine
How I built a Gemini Flash decision engine that reads Firebase Crashlytics, App Store / Google Play reviews, and AdMob revenue together, and outputs continue / pause / rollback for each staged rollout across six indie apps. Numbers from two months of production use included.
Running Gemini 3 Pro and Flash in Parallel on AdMob Monthly Reports — Notes from Ten Mornings
Implementation notes from sending the same AdMob monthly report to Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash in parallel for ten days. Cost, latency, and summary quality compared from an indie developer's perspective.
Running In-App Help Translation on Gemini 2.5 Flash for Three Months — An Indie Developer's Notes
After three months running my iOS and Android in-app help through a Gemini 2.5 Flash translation pipeline, here are the operational notes — when to fall back to Pro, how glossaries help, and the small lift it added to AdMob revenue.
Two Weeks of Classifying Half a Year of App Store Reviews with Gemini File API
I ran half a year of App Store Connect reviews through the Gemini File API for two weeks straight, asking it to classify and summarize them. Here is what worked, where Batch Mode fit better, and which sharp edges took me a few days to round off.
A Gemini API Control Plane for Indie Developers Running an App Portfolio
When you run several apps (wallpaper, healing, manifestation) on Gemini API, keys scatter and per-app cost attribution disappears. This is the three-layer control-plane architecture I have used for twelve months, with the traps that only show up over time.
Running Gemini Computer Use and Claude in Chrome Side by Side on the AdMob Console for a Week
A side-by-side journal of running Gemini Computer Use and Claude in Chrome on the AdMob console for a week, against three real tasks I face running wallpaper apps with 50M cumulative downloads: ad unit setup, mediation priority export, and eCPM anomaly detection.
Surfacing AdMob Floor Price Candidates from Weekly Reports with Gemini 2.5 Pro — A Six-App Indie Operations Note
A practical pipeline for moving AdMob floor price tuning from gut feel to data, using Gemini 2.5 Pro to read weekly CSV exports. Notes from operating six wallpaper apps in parallel, with Function Calling to produce structured candidate values.
Building an AdMob Revenue Anomaly Detector with Gemini API Function Calling
Learn how to build an automatic AdMob revenue anomaly detection system using Gemini API Function Calling — with real Python code, practical tips from 10+ years of indie app development, and Slack alerting integration.