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.
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.
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!
The entitled consumer is just a symptom of large scale anti competitive practices. It's classic price dumping by the oligopolists. It's so pervasive that consumer get used to these super low prices (free).
It's not that we are entitled to free stuff, but if you have access to models that are incredibly cheaper than Gemini and arguably more performative, it's very reasonable to point out that Google can afford to raise the prices thanks solely to the enormous scale and distribution power, specially with B2B market that rejects Chinese models.
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.
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.
OpenAI cancelling the $200/20x and then introducing the $500/25x was basically the canary in the coal mine.
I am looking forward to the 2026 numbers from Anthropic in preperation for their IPO, because that's where the really big numbers are going to be.