Google is one company I’ve always had sort of a soft spot for. When I was in sixth grade, we had to do a presentation about what we’d like to do when we grow up, and I presented on working as a programmer in the Google office in Singapore. While I’m yet to make that dream happen, the soft spot never really faded (which is funny, considering I ended up in an industry that basically lives or dies by Google’s mood).
The soft spot, though, has transitioned from being a kid who wanted to write code in their Singapore office to an adult who spends a worrying amount of time recommending their tools to other people. I’ve likely endorsed NotebookLM more times than their own team has, have always been a huge fan of their AI efforts, and even sat down with a senior engineer on the team recently to gush about NotebookLM. I mentioned all of the above to establish that I’m a fan of the direction Google’s heading in with AI. Well, I was.
Want to stay in the loop with the latest in AI? The XDA AI Insider newsletter drops weekly with deep dives, tool recommendations, and hands-on coverage you won’t find anywhere else on the site. Subscribe by modifying your newsletter preferences!
While you could once get by with using the free tiers of AI tools, that’s simply no longer an option with the usage caps AI labs have added to their tools. AI labs have been getting more brutal with their limits over the months, and this unfortunately includes Google. Earlier this month, the company quietly switched Gemini from a fixed daily request system to a “compute-based” usage model, meaning your limits now depend on how complex your prompts are, which features you use, and how long your chats run.
Similar to a lot of AI tools, Gemini too now has five-hour limits and weekly usage limits. You’ll first hit the five-hour limit, after which you’ll need to wait for it to reset before you can continue. Each five-hour window you max out also counts against your weekly cap. So, if you have a couple of days of heavy usage back-to-back, you can easily find yourself locked out of Gemini for the rest of the week with nothing but Google’s “you’ve hit the limit” message to accompany you.
The first major company to begin enforcing this kind of structure was Anthropic, which rolled out five-hour windows feeding into weekly caps for Claude back in August 2025. Google has essentially adopted the same model nine months later. Beyond the structural similarity, the limits are also just as restrictive. So, while I once praised Gemini for being the AI tool you could actually use without constantly hitting limits, those days are firmly behind us.
Beyond the structural similarity, the limits are also just as restrictive. So, while I once praised Gemini for being the AI tool you could actually use without constantly hitting limits, those days are firmly behind us.
As part of the same compute-based shake-up, AI Pro subscribers have lost the 1,000 monthly AI credits they used to get for Flow and Antigravity. The credits haven’t disappeared entirely, but they’ve been reclassified as an overage mechanism.
So, instead of getting them included with your subscription, you can now buy them separately once your compute-based weekly cap runs out. As for Antigravity and Flow, both have been pulled under the same compute-based weekly cap that now governs Gemini, meaning everything you do across Google’s AI ecosystem now draws from a single shared pool.
Something these AI labs have done time after time is hook users with generous limits during the promotional period, let them build their workflows around the tool, and then quietly walk the caps back once they’re hooked. Google has now joined the party. Perplexity is another company that did exactly this. Pro subscribers had been promised around 500 Deep Research queries daily, only to wake up one morning and find that number slashed to 20 a month.
I’ve always thought there’s a fundamental difference between how OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and even Microsoft have approached putting AI in front of users. And frankly, I can’t blame Google and Microsoft. ChatGPT lives at chatgpt.com. Claude lives at claude.ai. You open them when you want to use them, and you close them when you don’t. Copilot and Gemini don’t really work like that. Given that Google already owns the apps most of us spend our working hours on, the obvious play was to push AI through those existing surfaces instead of solely pushing Gemini.
Microsoft did the exact same thing with Copilot, embedding it into Word, Outlook, Excel, and Teams. Unfortunately, it means that Google has spent the last year cramming Gemini into products that were doing perfectly fine without it. This includes Maps, Drive, Docs, Calendar, Chrome, and now, even Samsung fridges. A lot of these integrations feel forced, and seem to exist simply so the company could point at every product in its lineup and say it has AI too. With a subscription to use Gemini, you’re paying extra for an AI that’s been bolted onto products you were already using for free, with little real benefit to show for it.
The AI subscription winner is not who you think.
Beyond Gemini, I pay for both Claude and ChatGPT, and the reason I keep both subscriptions running comes down to a few specific things in each. With Claude, it’s Claude Code, Cowork, and access to the Opus models. With ChatGPT, it’s Codex and the ecosystem OpenAI has built around it. In both cases, the subscription gets me something specific like a flagship tool or model I’d genuinely miss if it went away.
I can’t really say the same about Gemini. The models are solid, but they aren’t standouts, and the subscription perks Google keeps pushing are mostly the AI-in-every-app bolt-ons we just talked about, plus slightly higher limits on a system the company has been quietly tightening anyway. The one exception is NotebookLM, which I do think is worth paying for. Funnily enough, it’s also the one Google AI product that’s completely usable on the free tier (Google, please don’t read this).
So, while it’s unfortunate I have to even say this, I think there are better AI subscriptions to spend your money on than Gemini right now.
We want to hear from you. Share your perspective in the comments below, and please keep the conversation respectful.
Your comment has not been saved
This space is open for discussion.
Be the first to share your thoughts.
Leave a Reply