Look at the last few weeks side by side: Gemini: from October 9, accounts without a Google AI plan only get Flash-Lite. Flash and Pro go away. Even AI Plus, the cheapest paid plan, loses Pro. NotebookLM (now officially Gemini Notebook): on September 2 the fixed daily counts were replaced with a compute budget that refills every 5 hours up to a weekly ceiling, and longer chats and more sources spend more of it. Google AI Studio: Pro models came off the free API back in April. Only Flash and Flash-Lite are still free there. ChatGPT: ads have run on the Free and Go plans since earlier this year, and OpenAI starts testing bigger visual ads during image generation in the US this month. Meanwhile, in the same weeks, free users got new things. ChatGPT rolled out Finances to Free and Go users in the US. Gemini keeps adding features to the free app. So “the free plan is getting worse” isn’t quite it. The free plan is turning into a different product: every feature, running on the cheapest model, inside a budget, with ads. Features cost almost nothing to hand out once they’re built. Every answer from a big model costs money, every time. That’s what’s being taken back. A few things follow from that: Benchmarks and reviews mostly describe the top model. A free user next week isn’t using that model. A lot of the “Gemini got dumber” posts we’re about to see will really be about which plan the person is on. Budgets based on compute reward a different way of working than counts did. Under a daily message count, a long chat cost the same as a short one. Under a compute budget, the long chat that’s been running all week is the most expensive thing you can do. The free tiers are drifting apart in different directions, so “which one is best for free” has a different answer every few months. I build AI Toolbox, an extension that works across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, so I end up reading these plan pages far more closely than is healthy. The pattern is the same across all of them: the free plan’s feature list keeps getting longer while what each answer is actually worth goes down. submitted by /u/Ok_Negotiation_2587
Originally posted by u/Ok_Negotiation_2587 on r/ArtificialInteligence