Using a user account access for harnessing cloud vision api

[Darren D'Mello]

My client wants to build a sheets add-on that shall access the cloud vision API of the installed user instead of add-on hosted user account (service account)

The intention is, vision API provides 1000 objects detection for free/month. So if that's accessed from service account it would quickly deplete. Hence, if that's an add-on , the installed user can use his own trial quota and get his job done every month.

Remember that, the add-on may have 1000+ users. So the add-on hosted account user isn't ready to pay.

Is this possible? Any pointers would be helpful.

Thank you

[Dimu Designs]

Some off-the-cuff thoughts:

To pull this off, the installed user would need to configure and manage their own GCP project to use the Cloud Vision API. 

That means the end-user will need to have Billing enabled for that GCP project, have a service account setup etc. The question you need to ask your client is if they expect their target audience to be savvy enough to have all that setup. Just enabling billing alone is going to be a hard sell for end-users since it requires a credit card, not to mention the security concerns of granting a 3rd party (the add-on) access to a service account. Maybe you can build some kind of on-boarding process to guide users through setting up their own GCP project, but I'm not sure if its possible to build something like that using just GAS.

And then there is Google's add-on review process...