We're a small startup and our marketing ops team just switched from Marketo to Gemini (the paid API, not the free tier). I'm sharing this from a junior infra perspective because I helped with the data pipeline integration. I only know Terraform and basic AWS, so this was a learning curve 😅
**The happier part (why we did it):**
* **Cost was insane.** Marketo's pricing felt opaque and heavy for our volume. Gemini API costs are clearer and scale with usage.
* **Integration was simpler for us.** Our stack is already on GCP (BigQuery, Looker). Using Gemini's API felt like adding another microservice. Here's a tiny snippet of the Terraform for the Cloud Scheduler job that triggers our campaign generation:
```hcl
resource "google_cloud_scheduler_job" "weekly_campaign_ideas" {
name = "gemini-campaign-ideas"
schedule = "0 9 * * 1" # Monday 9 AM
http_target {
http_method = "POST"
uri = google_cloud_run_service.campaign_processor.status[0].url
oidc_token {
service_account_email = google_service_account.gemini_caller.email
}
}
}
```
* **Speed of iteration.** Marketing can prototype new email copy or segment ideas directly via our internal tool that calls the API, instead of waiting for Marketo workflows.
**The sadder part (what we miss):**
* **No built-in visual workflow builder.** Marketo's flowchart-like canvas is gone. Now, everything is code or our basic UI wrapper. The marketing team had to learn to write (simple) structured prompts.
* **We lost the "all-in-one" lead database.** We now have to pipe everything back to BigQuery and build dashboards separately. More control, but also more work for me.
* **Sometimes the output is... too creative.** We have to guardrail prompts heavily. Marketo's templates were rigid but safe. Gemini will sometimes invent product features we don't have if we're not specific.
Overall, it's a win for cost and dev-friendliness, but the marketing folks had to become a bit more technical.