™Google Is Taking Its Top Gemini AI Models Away From Free Users Thursday
Free accounts drop to Flash-Lite, per The Verge. Pro will take the $19.99-a-month AI Pro plan, since the $4.99 tier loses it too.
Starting Thursday, Oct. 9, anyone using Google's Gemini chatbot for free will get one model, Flash-Lite, the lightest of the three Google offers, The Verge reported. Flash and Pro are the two stronger models free users can pick from today, and both are going behind a paywall.
Each one costs a different amount. Flash will take Google's $4.99-a-month AI Plus plan. Pro, which Google's help page calls its most advanced model, will take AI Pro or AI Ultra, because Plus subscribers are losing Pro too. Google says it'll email Plus customers to tell them when that happens, according to The Verge.
Free users keep the model Google's help page pitches for speed and everyday chores like summarizing and brainstorming. The same page saves the heavier work, tough math and coding, for Pro. It also shows how much text and files Gemini can take in at once: 32,000 tokens without a subscription, compared with 1 million on AI Pro and Ultra.
Google's plans page listed these U.S. prices on Tuesday, Oct. 6:
- AI Plus, $4.99 a month: Flash after Thursday, but no Pro. It doubles the free plan's usage limit and adds 400 GB of cloud storage.
- AI Pro, $19.99 a month: the Pro model and four times the free usage limit. It also bundles 5 TB of storage and YouTube Premium Lite.
- AI Ultra, from $99.99 a month: five times AI Pro's limits. A $199.99 version raises that to 20 times.
The same page offers college students a free year of AI Pro. On Tuesday it was also still telling free users they get Gemini 3.6 Flash and some access to Gemini 3.1 Pro, two days before both disappear from the free plan.
Whichever model people end up with, Google says they'll still be able to set it to low, medium or high effort, per The Verge, but the higher settings use up a usage limit faster. Those limits reset every five hours until a user hits a weekly cap, Google's help page says.
Plus subscribers will find out by email when Pro goes away. Free users lose it Thursday.
Source: The Verge, retrieved October 6, 2026. Other sources: support.google.com, gemini.google.
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