Gemini ending free use of Flash and Pro models

rjh29

Flash and Pro models are moving to paid plans, free users will only get Flash-Lite. Flash-Lite is the same model used by the Android phone Gemini app and AI Overviews in Google Search, which is very poor at reasoning and makes many errors. Personally, I've been using the free plan quite a lot and never hit a rate limit, but noticed the quality dropping. Pro was almost never available. Perhaps they aren't able to deliver a good quality Flash model to free users.

Alifatisk

I understand why would would move Pro variant behind paywall, you don’t get many uses of it anymore on free tier. But moving the Flash version behind paywall is kinda crazy. Did we forget what Flash was meant for? I have tried Flash-lite, in my tests, almost all the recent models we have today are good and enough for most daily tasks. Flash-lite is one of the few models available that is easy to notice its flaws. Its good to summarize data (for example search results), that’s it.

expedited123

I'm always amazed how entitled people are these days for free stuff. That being said, it does show costs are piling up for these AI companies if even Google is restricting free access to a relatively smaller model amid the AI hype train. Good!

stephbook

That's what they want you to pay for: https://share.gemini.google/r9T9GPuC0Cjc

simianwords

what happens to the aistudio.google.com thing? :)

Havoc

Fine, but can they at least update the models accessible from the various locations? gemini.google.com/app runs a mixture of 3.1 and 3.6 while 3.8 is in aistudio Really would have thought there is an incentive to move everything to one model generation to get scaling efficiency

hypfer

Google Gemini API use also moved to prepaid-only starting this month. There might be a connection

vanyle

I think this move will be part of a more global trend when other AI companies get publicly traded. Because model providers have no moat, and the price of inference is quite large compared to just search, providing it for free makes no sense. Right now, the goal of the free chatgpt and claude tiers is to accustom more people to AI, to create a new market, not to capture customers. This strategy makes sense for start-ups with a lot of funding, but not for companies that need to be profitable. Apart from google, no large company is providing free inference to their large models in a consumer app (apart from meta maybe).

fwlr

A comment that caught my eye: this means even on my tablet I'm gonna be stuck turning my smart lights on and off with Gemini flash lite. So many times when I've run out of COMPUTE, it's reduced itself to flash lite And it would just spit out nonsense BS saying that it can't turn the lights on or off, or it can't set calendar events, when I know for a fact that it can. I'm really looking forward to having to fight to get my bedroom lights to turn on every night now. I do not recognize the world these people live in.

xyzzy_plugh

This is what happens when you give people a valuable service for free. You can't take it away without a lot of complaining and loss of good will. Flash-lite is pretty capable and getting that entirely for free is not a bad deal at all. It was always obvious Google couldn't keep letting non-paying users use Flash and Pro. I'm not a fan of how they bundled their plans but they're not too bad especially when shared with a family. I think I've got almost 1TB of Google Photos at this point. This is a much better page than TFA: https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/17004136

mark_l_watson

It was inevitable that the providers would stop giving away free cookies and milkshakes. I pay Google $5/month for Chat and my wife gets to share that: a fantastic deal. I even get a short weekly (one each) opus and gemini vibe coding sessions with agy. I pay for inference: I paid $3300 for a Mac mini 64G M5-Pro which runs Qwen-3.8-Flash-Next (3 bit quant) with pi-dev and the results are so very much excellent enough for about 60% of my work and paying Deepseek for deepseek-4.1-flash with Deepseek Harness handles almost everything else. I worked at Google in 2013 and I mostly like them as a company. I like their approach to AI in general, but I hate the business models of Anthropic and OpenAI and I fear the US taxpayer is going to pick up the tab on this one.

solnyshok

what free tier models are still available comparable to flash? I use claude for IT stuff, but google flash was good for topic research and general queries, with some basic linux administration advise.I can run moe up to 48gb on my own hardware too, if needed.

JKCalhoun

We'll see how this goes for them. If Flash Lite is not useful to the average user, Google will become an also-ran. Open AI already has the widespread (and now generic) term "ChatGPT" to refer to any and all LLMs (by the common public—when I use the term "LLM" I get blank stares).

daft_pink

no one wants to use them anyways. i pay $100 a month for ultra and i'm using claude and chatgpt.

franczesko

Gemini was a choice only when I ran out of free queries elsewhere. It was never a choice for its quality.

beybol

A problem often arises when a paid plan competes with a free one within the same product. Clockify limited basic functions (data export, billable rates) in April to convert users from free to a paid plan. Google has now moved free competitive models behind paid plan as well. It happens all the time - nothing unexpected. Clockify, Gemini are just examples.