Google significantly reduces the free offering of its Gemini app. Starting from October 9, 2026, users without a subscription will only have access to the smallest model Flash-Lite, according to a support document from the company.
The previously freely available models Flash and Pro will completely disappear for free accounts.
Three payment tiers will structure model access
Anyone wanting to use Gemini beyond the basic version will need a subscription. The cheapest package, Google AI Plus, costs 4.99 euros per month in Germany and additionally unlocks the middle model Flash, which balances speed and reasoning ability.
Full access to all three tiers, including the most powerful model Pro, which is intended for complex tasks such as programming or data analysis, is only offered by Google AI Pro for 21.99 euros per month. The top tier, Google AI Ultra, costs around 275 euros per month, according to the industry outlet Android Headlines – unverified independently, as Google's own pricing page for Germany does not list this amount separately.
Pro and Ultra customers also receive the Deep Think feature for parallel reasoning. Flash-Lite is mainly suitable for simple everyday tasks such as short summaries; for more elaborate research, the performance is often insufficient.
The change applies to private Google accounts worldwide, including in Germany and the rest of the EU, where Google already sells the three subscription tiers via Google One.
Usage limits increase with each payment tier
Google links the model choice to a new limit system that is based on the actual computational load of individual requests rather than a fixed number of daily messages. According to the support document, the complexity of the input, used additional features, and the length of the chat history are taken into account in the calculation.
The quotas reset every five hours until a weekly limit is reached; after that, only Flash-Lite is available. Google AI Plus thus receives limits that are twice as high as a free account, Google AI Pro four times as high.
Google AI Ultra allows, depending on the variant, five to twenty times the Pro limit. Paying customers will be informed of the change via individual email, while free users will notice the removal of the stronger models only upon their next login after October 9.
For daily office work, this means: those who previously had long reports or contracts evaluated with the more powerful Pro model for free will have to switch to the simpler Flash-Lite or pay starting from this date.
Observers suspect preparation for a more expensive top model
Google does not officially justify the step; open questions remain regarding affected Workspace and enterprise accounts. Android Headlines places the change within the company's recent product offensive: just at the beginning of October, Google launched Gemini 4 Argon, a new top model, access to which remains exclusive for now.
The restriction of the cheaper tiers is likely to also cushion the computational load for the more elaborate new model and at the same time encourage more free users to subscribe. The step fits into an industry-wide trend: OpenAI and Anthropic are also tiering access to their most powerful models through paid subscription levels.
For Google, Gemini is also the central lever in the competition with ChatGPT and Claude, which is why a sharper separation between free and paid usage could lead to criticism among existing free users in the short term.
It will be crucial whether users actually miss the lost capabilities in their daily lives or switch to free alternatives like ChatGPT or Claude, which have not yet cut their own free models as drastically. Starting from October 9, the usage numbers will show how many people will actually be asked to pay.
