Gemini Flash and Pro move to paid plans, leaving free users with only Flash-Lite

support.google.com

5 pointsmaxloh4 comments

Mistral and DeepSeek mobile apps (free plan) are excellent replacements for the Gemini app/3.6-flash.

They’re both excellent, but don’t you find the free quota is exhausted after just a few research queries? I haven’t tried them in awhile, so maybe they’re better now.

You can add Kimi to this list: it has one of the best deep research agents, but just one search uses ~75% of a weekly quota.

Even paid plans are still on 3.1 Pro, which is kind of a joke. I wonder when they plan on releasing 4 Argon. It'll probably be some time after Opus releases 5.6 Opus/Fable and OAI release 6.1-Astra, ensuring they're at least one or two generations behind the frontier...

It seems Google is going for the integrability of AI into every single product they have over being an OpenAI/Anthropic style provider. Which is a shame because Gemini was great for a while, NotebookLM is lovely and the flash lite model was really good at structured workflows. So I’d love to see them continue the line.

No idea what gating Argon like that does for them.

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