Bring your own Gemini key
Reading a label and working out a recommendation both need Google's Gemini. Out of the box those calls go through a service I run at dramvine.com. Settings has a field where you can paste your own Gemini key, and the calls go to Google directly.
What it gets you
Your traffic stops passing through anything of mine. With a key in the field, label scans and collection summaries go from your phone straight to Google. They never reach dramvine.com or the request log the privacy page describes.
You also come off a shared allowance. The service I run sits behind one pooled limit of thirty requests a minute across everyone using the app. At today's numbers you would never notice it. If that changes, your own key means you are not queued behind anyone.
What it costs you
On the free tier Google may use what you send to improve its products, and that includes review by people. On the paid tier it does not. The privacy page's promise rests on the app's own service running on the paid tier.
A key you create in AI Studio and never attach billing to is a free-tier key. Paste one in and your label photographs and collection summaries fall under the free-tier terms. Turning billing on for your Google Cloud project moves you to paid.
The free tier has a daily cap. Hit it and the app stops making calls until the quota resets at midnight Pacific. Billing removes the cap and the usage bills to you.
If you do turn billing on, the amounts are small. A label scan runs about $0.0007, so cataloguing a two hundred bottle cellar costs somewhere around fourteen cents. A recommendation is about $0.006, and re-checking a drink window costs about the same as a scan. Google has promotional pricing running to the end of 2026 on the model behind the recommendations and the re-checks, which puts both at roughly half those figures until then. Scans are on a different model and are not discounted.
Where the key lives
In the app's private storage on your phone, in a file no other app can read without the device being rooted, and covered by your phone's own encryption whenever it is locked. The app does not put a second layer of encryption on top of that.
It is kept out of Android's cloud backup and out of the Google Sheets backup deliberately, in its own file so it can be excluded without dropping the rest of your settings. It never goes to me. A new phone starts without it. Uninstall the app and it is gone.
To get it gone sooner, clear the field in Settings. Deleting the key in AI Studio kills it everywhere and takes about a minute. I left it at that.
Setting one up
Google moves this screen around often enough that any screenshots I put here would be wrong within a few months. Paste the block below into Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude or whatever you use, and it will walk you through the current version.
Walk me through creating a Google Gemini API key that I can paste into a third-party Android app, step by step, for the interface as it exists right now. Tell me where to go, what to click, and what the key looks like when I have it. Then tell me two things clearly: whether the key I just made is on Google's free tier or its paid tier, and exactly what I would do to switch it to paid if I wanted to. Explain the difference between the two tiers in terms of what Google is allowed to do with the content I send. Also tell me what daily limits apply on the free tier, and how I revoke or delete the key later if I change my mind.
Then open Settings in Dram+Vine, find AI service, paste the key in and press Save key. The app checks it against Google at that point and flags a bad paste straight away. The check spends no tokens, so it costs nothing however many times you do it. The field stays masked unless you tap into it, since Settings is a screen people screenshot.
It takes effect on your next scan. Clearing the field puts you back on my service.