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Comment by byefruit | Hacker News Reader

Just checked my Gemini app, still only have 3.1 Pro, 3.6 Flash and 3.6 Thinking on Pro. Looks like it's Ultra only.

They've been so slow to update their top models and roll them out that despite subscribing to the Gemini Pro plan, I use it so rarely that this is my last month. That and their product offering was so confusing I basically gave up.

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My Google Workspace Gemini (with "AI Expanded Access") has 3.6 Flash, 3.8 Thinking, 4 Carbon.

My personal "AI Pro" Gemini has 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.8 Flash, 3.1 Pro, 4 Argon.

Pretty inconsistent.

This is the GoogleWay

I say the same thing on every thread. For 23e a month on ChatGPT I get access to the top models, almost always day one. I might not get a huge amount of usage but I get to use the flagship and try things out. On AI plus for the same price I get basically nothing, and models that are 6-9 months old. I don't understand why google is not using their size and leverage to get these models into consumers, with a useful harness and take market share.

It's not their business. Anthropic and OpenAI don't have millions of phones in the wild blasting the ever-loving hell out of Luna or Haiku to create timers and search contacts. They probably made Carbon just to help distill the next Gemini Flash. They are fine letting a _few_ people use it, maybe, but I bet they are also fine if no one does. Worst case for them is probably a bunch of $20 subs building things with their top model and taking compute away from Pixel 11 calendar searches or google.com "summaries".

This sounds an awful lot like Yahoo not needing to compete with Google on search because they have the most valuable "web property".

ChatGPT and Google compete in the same market: a text box that answers your questions. The text box provider who can best answer the most difficult questions always wins because users don't care who they ask their easy questions to. Being a low-end text box provider is not a business model: providers either compete at the high-end or die.

Except Google already has marketshare for search and their Flash model does a decently good job there.

It’s 100% their business

They created the LLM!

It’s just bureaucracy, they’re not escaping involution

> On AI plus for the same price

AI plus is $4.99. AI Pro would be the equivalent at $19.99, and it gives you access to Argon (assuming 23e means €23)

I pay for Ultra and have been using Argon for a couple weeks. I just checked in both Agy and Gemini and Carbon is there for me now, too. I'll try it, but Argon is itself already so slow that I'm not sure Carbon will make sense for most activities.

On pro here and I can do about 2 design tasks a week before I hit usage limits with Argon. The usage limit with carbon is probably gone just loading the context.

Yep, I'm on Pro as well, and Argon been hugely useful, but I get about 10 prompts with it a week. And that means that I have to use 3.8 flash for most of what I'm doing, which is obviously not a great experience for any kind of long horizon tasks.

I've been using Argon (Medium) pretty heavily the past couple of weeks to create a website and an app and am not coming close to my Ultra limits. I've used High for a couple of code reviews and security audits.

I'm not sure if I'm a sucker for paying $100/mo for this, and Google's harnesses are so underwhelming compared to Claude Code, but I'm not having a bad experience. Compared to the beginning of the year when Antigravity was almost unusable and Gemini Pro 3.1 was noticeably behind other options.

Argon is slow but surprisingly my progress is noticeably faster. If you aren’t prompting extra ambitiously with top tier models, you should probably just use deep seek.

Not quite at the build me a whole app level but you need to definitely zoom out a few times and prompt from either a feature set or many overlapping details at once.

> Google's harnesses are so underwhelming compared to Claude Code,

Could you please elaborate? A heavy user of Antigravity myself I had the opposite impression. Quite possibly I only scratched the surface of what Claude has to offer. For example how would you compare `/remote-control`? Would you say you prefer the Claude version ?

I wonder why my consumer Gemini app has Argon and 3.8 flash with a pro plan but so many people here don't have that.

Is the issue that consumers get it sooner or is the roll out random or locked to some other factor?

In one case I had to upgrade my Antigravity GUI to see new models, I guess because of an API change.

At the same time, the CLI saw the new models without any change. Possibly that was just because my CLI install was newer than the GUI one. (Edit: oh, it's because my CLI autoupdates. Autoupdates for the GUI on Linux in an AppImage is... messy.)

Edit: But in this case:

> Gemini 4 Carbon is available via the API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business for all paying developers and enterprises

I.e. Seems to be API only right now.

I found out when I opened Gemini app on phone and it showed Carbon Medium as default

I have Carbon in my consumer Gemini too. I have a Google drive storage upgrade that I pay for that I assume is bundled with it - it's the only thing I can think of as I've certainly not gone out of my way to do anything special to get access (and so far, it is free for me to access it this way)

In true google fashion the situation is a total mess.

The gist of it is that there are many different "Pro" plans, and the model access/quota depends on things like whether or not you are a workspace "Pro" user, whether or not you are a discount/promo "Pro" user, whether or not you are a 3rd party "Pro" user, and then also beyond all that what country you are in. Common examples of these gimped "pro" plans are Pixel "pro" plans that came with pixel purchases, and Jio "Pro" plans which are discounted plans available through a telecom provider popular in India.

But if you have a normal Google account, and pay the full $20/mo, and live in a country that doesn't have tight regulations, you'll get the proper Pro account.

I have Carbon in VS Code and the Antigravity CLI.

Seems like a completely fair and normal business practice to do a gradual roll-out first to trusted testers, then to Ultra, maybe to Pro later. Not sure why Plus and free users feel so aggrieved that they can't free-ride with those paying $200/month.

$200 a month is free riding on API users the $20 a month isn't free riding on the $200 plan.

Do you have any evidence that subscriptions are loss leaders?

And by evidence, I mean something more than "at API rates my usage would have cost $1000".

Because Anthropic's SEC docs show that subscriptions are gross-margin positive.

Since Google has lower inference costs than Anthropic, I'd expect their subscriptions to be more profitable, not less.

Paying 20$ a month for search already seems like a lot. That’s really what the 20$ tier is for

Hating on Google is cool, but pretending not to understand pricing tiers is weird as hell; when those 2 collide, you get this thread. Smart HNers, who I assume are fine understanding multidimensional tiers like the one Netflix has (price/resolution/simultaneous devices/ads) are seemingly very confused by Googles 2D AI tiers[1] (price/model availability)

1. Granted, the Google One pricing page is crowded with non-AI stuff, but for the AI model section is easy to understand what each subscription level gets you.

Update your Gemini app if its not up to date. You should have access to Argon on the Pro plan. Just keep in mind only Ultra has access to Argo/Carbon in Antigravity IDE.

Same. On PLUS subscription. One of those situations where you really want a human to talk to..

When's the last time you checked what is offered by the plus subscription? It's been a while now that it's the equivalent to ChatGPT Go (on price and offer), giving only increased limits but no difference in model access compared to free.

When I switched from the Pro to the Plus subscription, they did not state anything to that effect. I expected a smaller quota of their most recent flash models, and instead I got models that are so old they are useless to me, so I canceled the subscription.

It is the lack of transparency that gets me. With PAYG open-weight models, I know exactly what I get for my money.

> It is the lack of transparency that gets me.

The Google One site lists all the tiers and their access levels. You didn't bother to check, and call the lack of a nag-screen a "lack of transparency?"

I did check. Did you?

It literally says "Access to our Flash models" with no indication that they would see no updates for... How many months has it been?

I think you can understand why I was expecting the version of the Flash models to keep up with updates.

Edit: And back when I paid for my yearly subscription they also promised access to the Pro models. They simply took that feature away and offered no compensation. So, understandably, I am disappointed and disinterested in their offerings.

People see

"Access to 3.1 pro" and they read it as "Access to Gemini Pro models".

Turns out when Google names a model in that subscription, they mean that model, not necessarily that class of model :/

Checked my ultra and it’s there now. Too afraid to use it though since my quota would drop like a rock, maybe on Friday if I have enough percentage left over.

There is something to be said about the fact that Google tomorrow could release the greatest performing, most efficient, comprehensively capable LLM of all times and even if you are a paying customer of theirs, you could not access it across their interfaces. Not even going to mention the announcement to release delay, which given the numbers don't seem to have changed, I cannot comprehend why they'd do.

What I will say is that their release strategy has led to this frontier model release post getting off the main page within 90 minutes, no other lab manages that.

considering how little you can use argon with pro, i guess carbon will be the same so why do you care?

To put a firm number on this, I went through 40% of my Argon quota with three small projects: update a cartogram with the daily election data from the California Secretary of State; read a bunch of campaign filing PDFs, property tax bills, and business registrations to create a graph of related individuals; and write an optimizer that snaps GTFS transit route shapes to where the roads actually are.

I'm getting this quota for free from Google Fi so it seems like a square deal to me. But running out of quota mid-project can be irritating.

They are all available through OpenRouter for 2/10$.

Immensely more expensive than a sub.

They just took 3.1 pro away from me while I was asking about Cami Clark and Epstein (for due-dilligince), lol. Now I have access to 3.6 Flash and 3.5 flash-light. So I canceled my sub. Shame. I used to love using antigravity when the allowance was good.

It should be on Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra subscriptions, I think.

https://gemini.google/subscriptions/

I use Antigravity via Google Cloud and it's immediately available. I am not an Ultra tier subscriber.

Is it location specific? I have AI Pro plan and I have had Gemini 3.8 Flash for months, and I got Argon about two weeks ago in Antigravity, and now I also have Argon in the Gemini app.

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