I watched the Umbraco Winter Keynote and was really interested in the new product that is coming out of HQ. It's called Umbraco.AI and is a free, open source solution for embedding AI in to the backoffice of Umbraco, or the official strapline "AI integration layer for Umbraco CMS, built on Microsoft.Extensions.AI."
I had an Umbraco meetup last night - Umbraco Scotland - and I wanted to do a demo of Umbraco.AI in action, however I hit a few stumbling blocks. Mostly down to my own incompetance of not actually reading the docs and just jumping head first in to downloading the Umbraco.AI nuget package.
So, step one. Go to the Umbraco.AI github repo and follow the instructions for "Quick start".
Then when it came to actually picking what service I wanted to use, Claude, Copilot, Google etc. I wanted to do it as cheaply as I could. This was just a demo after all. Sure I could have put a couple of pounds worth of credit on a service but after a quick chat on the Umbraco Discord, I was told about Google Gemini and the free tier.
I popped on to Google and setup an Gemini API Key and then pasted that key in to the AI section in Umbraco backoffice - one tip, if AI settings dont show in the backoffice, check that your user group has permission for that section. Mine didnt by default so I added "AI" to the admin group under the Users section.
Once I had put in the API key, whenever I made a request, I was told that I'd maxed out my credits!
After another chat on discord, I was told that even though I'm on a free tier, you still need to add card details. I did that and tada! The API worked and I was able to make requests to Gemini.
One other thing I found out though was when I selected Gemini 2 from the dropdown menu in the backoffice, I originally got an error message saying Gemini 2 is no longer available under the free tier. I did some searching and found that Gemini 3 is now available for the free tier.
So to fix this, since I had downloaded the source code for Umbraco.AI, I was able to modify the GoogleChatCapability.cs and include gemini-3-flash-preview
private static readonly string[] KnownChatModels =
[
"gemini-3-flash-preview",
"gemini-2.0-flash",
"gemini-2.0-flash-lite",
"gemini-1.5-pro",
"gemini-1.5-flash",
"gemini-1.5-flash-8b",
];
This then puts the gemini 3 option in the dropdown menu.
I have created a PR to update the dropdown and it's currently a work in progress (27/02/2026)
But hopefully you find this useful and you can try Umbraco.AI for free with a little bit of modifications until the PR is merged or a fix is added.