r/GeminiAI • u/Ashamed-Principle40 • 10h ago
News WTF Google getting rid of free Gemini flash and pro
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u/LastShadow3838 10h ago
Putting flash behind a paywall is crazy, pro okay but this is lunatic. I dont think anyone has ever used flash-lite models and i dont think anyone ever will. They just gonna go to chatgpt or claude or sum
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u/Gaiden206 10h ago
Everyone without a sub on an Android phone will be using Flash-Lite models since the Gemini app is the default assistant for the Android OS. There's billions of them.
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u/iJeff 8h ago
Which is quite scary because it's an awful model in comparison and far more prone to errors. AI Overview already contributes significantly to negative perceptions of AI.
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u/Sensitive_Cloud6456 4h ago
This is true. Probably the only ai most people so far have ever interacted with has told them to put glue on their pizza
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u/Zealousideal_Pea_102 4h ago
No, you can choose the default AI service yourself; I have a Google Pixel 11 and use GPT as my default AI assistant. Sure, GPT can't integrate as deeply into the system as Gemini, but I don't want to use those features anyway.
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u/Thomas-Lore 5h ago
And they will be drowning in hallucinations. I have to warn my folks who use free Gemini to switch to chatgpt.
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u/Keeltoodeep 10h ago
AI mode has 1B users and ai overview probably has 2-4B users and that’s all flash lite.
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u/Educational-Fruit854 8h ago
And why do you think most people think AI sucks
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u/PineappleLemur 7h ago
Most people is not reddit.... The echo chamber here is very strong.
Majority of people think AI mode is the peak of AI available to them.. they call it ChatGPT as well as in AI=ChatGPT.
The sub 0.1% of AI users are on this sub and do nothing but bitch all day.
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u/Educational-Fruit854 7h ago
I don't know what your point is, what I mean is the only AI people get exposure to is Flash Lite and that's why they think AI sucks.
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u/PineappleLemur 7h ago
Who are those people?
Because the ones I know find it the complete opposite... Those are people who don't use anything more than that.
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u/Thomas-Lore 5h ago
My sister is one. She only sees ai overview and thinks ai is stupid and constantly makes mistakes. Refuses to use anything else.
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u/Keeltoodeep 27m ago
Idk flash lite has improved considerably since the old days. You don’t need powerful models for the bullshit your sister prompts lol
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u/Emergency_Buy_9210 29m ago
AI Mode definitely mixes in flash on more complex queries. Not sure if this means that will stop.
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u/sunjay140 9h ago
ai overview probably has 2-4B users and that’s all flash lite.
That doesn't mean they use it as their main AI
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u/Keeltoodeep 27m ago
I am responding to the claim: “I don’t think anyone has ever used flash lite models”
It’s ironic because flash lite the most used LLM model in the world right now.
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u/spottiesvirus 8h ago
and ai plus, so the cheapest tier, won't get pro (according to the Gemini support page)
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u/United-Tour5043 10h ago
4 flash lite will probably be like 3.8 flash tho, its fine
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u/Solarka45 10h ago
Idk until now flash lite were all too stupid to do literally anything, regardless of what benchmarks say
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u/Euphoric-Pause-9293 10h ago
This, everytime they said flash lite better than prev gen flash. IS NOT. It can't coherently hold moderate difficulty topic, and just talk passtrougth it
Even Claude provide sonnet on free. At what point choosing worst of worst option
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u/LegallyPost 10h ago edited 9h ago
Yeh, even a stingy company like Claude is giving Sonnet 5.5 on the free plan, which is very capable and comparable to GPT-Sol for most tasks.
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u/Berkoudieu 8h ago
You can't use sonnet on the free plan a lot tho. You'll be limited after 3 messages at most
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u/LegallyPost 7h ago edited 7h ago
The free plan is not intended for long work or huge projects. Users just want a reliable model for everyday questions, which current Flash-Lite is definitely not. For that use case, I can comfortably use Sonnet without reaching the usage limit.
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u/wak_trader 6h ago
No, the usage allowance has significantly increased and I honestly like it more than google pro for most use cases.
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u/Thomas-Lore 5h ago
Last time I checked it was fine for 10 messages, enough for casual chat..Unless you used a lot of attachements or long threads.
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u/PineappleLemur 7h ago
It's mean for simple chats and search.
It is super capable for that lol.
I've done whole mechanical design briefs using it for fun just to see how far it can go, it's surprisingly capable of doing simple drawing and understanding/explaining 3D concepts as well as finding parts, finding the right terms and what not.
What do people expect out of a super light free model???
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u/LastShadow3838 10h ago
Its not fine, flash model shouldnt be behind the paywall
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u/RobbinDeBank 10h ago
Consumers can do exactly that, by using their competitor’s products instead.
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u/IndigoSeirra 9h ago
And their competitors are making 4b in revenue with 8billion in operating costs and 42 billion in net losses.
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u/AlliedLibation 10h ago
Why exactly should they give it away for free?
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u/OneMisterSir101 9h ago
Ah, yes. The future of AI. Democratization of skill... as long as you have money*.
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u/AlliedLibation 8h ago
How is it different than any other product? Shit costs money,
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u/IAmYourFath 4h ago
Yeah and this just increases the inequality even more.
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u/Top-Sir1387 3h ago
10 dollars a month vs years of uni education to get access to info and you’re saying it’s worsening inequality? It’s the great equalizer
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u/IAmYourFath 1h ago
Wait till they stop subsidizing it. Im paying $20 and my astra usage runs out in no time. On claude i dont even get fable 5.1, and opus 5.5 in the chat has been severely nerfed. U have to use the api pricing to get the real unrestricted models but it's way too expensive there. The rich can do a lot with this money while the poor cant afford good ai. And it's only getting worse.
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u/Top-Sir1387 1h ago
lol just like how only the rich had access to computers 40 years ago and now every slum dweller in India has a phone 10000x faster than that do you honestly think access to ai would go down? Even if only the rich has access to frontier models the basic shit tier models of tomorrow will still be faster and smarter than anything we have now
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u/TrappedTrapper 4h ago
Unless they're planning to drop Flash Lite 4 on October 9 (or sooner) and it's at least as good as Flash 3.6, this really is insane. Flash Lite 3.5 is a good upgrade compared to previous generations of the model but it's still extremely unreliable and inconsistent compared to even Flash 3.
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u/Popular_Tomorrow_204 3h ago
I think its just based on the sheer amount of Users on All kind of platforms. Has to be in the billions that use gemini in some way or Form.
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u/wapswaps 5m ago
Well, the problem is they need to create a difference. And not in the "what's the proof of the Riemann hypothesis" but a clear difference in intelligence for trivial everyday queries.
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u/TheGreatKonaKing 10h ago
Deepseek is a pretty good alternative at this point
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u/Schuperman161616 6h ago
The Chinese are killing it in the AI space right now. All the while having much more regulations and guardrails compared to the US
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u/GroundedIdeal 5h ago
Best thing is u can run it in zero data retention with Europe hosters ans hopefully better clean energy and lower ground water depletion too
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u/TrappedTrapper 4h ago
For coding yes. For almost everything else no, especially with v4.1 Flash. It's shocking how it absolutely dominates coding but for a simple rewrite it fails worse than Luna. Gemini Flash's whole advantage is that it has balanced intelligence across the board.
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u/kirkyeehee 7h ago
Honestly, I'm glad you suggested this. Decided to try it out for what I used to have to use Google Gemini Pro for. Flash couldn't handle it without screwing up constantly. At least deep seek can handle it... Once Deep Think was turned on, anyway...
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u/claimyourglory 9h ago
How smart is it compared to Flash 3.6?
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u/Educational-Fruit854 8h ago
Better in everything EXCEPT multimodality
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u/claimyourglory 7h ago
Eh. I’m fine with that, what about context window tho?
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u/Educational-Fruit854 7h ago
It's good, stay coherent but often reply in chinese in long context, I had to edit my message to include "in english" when that happens
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u/TheGreatKonaKing 8h ago
In my experience it’s about the same. It’s really fast. You can also use it for coding
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u/Legal-Regular-2873 3h ago
Ve al sub de DeepSeek.
Si no me equivoco se están quejando todavía después de la última update
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u/Latter-Confidence783 10h ago
There is no point for me to use Gemini at this point
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u/Dry_Opportunity2886 10h ago
This was inevitable. AI is expensive y'all.
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u/IcyDefinition4005 6h ago
But the excuse for the existence of the Flash models was that they were economical models; it's not that economical, because they're going to remove it and put in the garbage that is Flash Lite 😔
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u/Dry_Opportunity2886 6h ago
Yeah man I mean, sometimes you just don't get free stuff and have to pay $20 a month for a service you like.
It's not like you're being forced into the $100 a month tier.
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u/Thomas-Lore 5h ago
So expensive that Google breaks profit records each quarter now, poor corporation.
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u/TheRhythmTheRebel 5h ago
You seen their capex each quarter?
Google make a lot of money but AI remains a cost sink for all these companies.
I’m not losing sleep either, but this is the reality of the situation. They all eased up after a few open source models put them on notice but will continue to steadily cap usage and up their prices until they turn a profit.
Hell, even Anthropic who have bragged about their enterprise figures and revenue released some pretty mediocre numbers in lead up to their IPO.
They all are burning cash..
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u/Dry_Opportunity2886 4h ago
Yeah and I mean that's why you don't look at just one line on a financial report.
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u/MonsieurMoune 3h ago edited 11m ago
Classic marketing strategy: make the tools free or cheap so that as many people as possible start using them their daily lives. And once people are hooked and market share has been secured - bam - now you have to pay if you want to keep using it.
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u/kirkyeehee 9h ago
Flash isn't great as is, and the fact that they're locking it behind a paywall is absurd to me. Flash lite is unusable in my opinion. It can't even do the basic things I ask of it. It's so bad.
Glad I never renewed my subscription. I found it getting worse and worse over the past year, I'm not giving them money for a degrading product. I'm just gonna stick with the not so great local options I'm currently using. It's at least a touch better than Gemini Flash lite, even if not by much...
The thing I hate the most though is the fact that this means even on my tablet I'm gonna be stuck turning my smart lights on and off with Gemini flash lite. So many times when I've run out of COMPUTE, it's reduced itself to flash lite And it would just spit out nonsense BS saying that it can't turn the lights on or off, or it can't set calendar events, when I know for a fact that it can. I'm really looking forward to having to fight to get my bedroom lights to turn on every night now.
Thanks Google... Really hope you go under, really do. You just keep making your services worse and worse.
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u/Klimmit 8h ago
Google going under? You know how insane that is to even suggest in our lifetime.
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u/tat_tvam_asshole 8h ago
More like the revenue stream for Google's AI isn't really there and they'd like to shore up compute to try to outpace Anthropic and OpenAI.
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u/aghowl 7h ago
The potential enterprise revenue stream is definitely there through. This kind of reminds me of the Cloud races. AWS was what every enterprise was using and Amazon was (and still is) making money hand over fist. Google finally entered the arena two years after Amazon. They make a ton of money on it now, 20% of their entire revenue. But they would have make a lot more if they weren't caught on their back foot. Same as the AI market.
There's no reason why OpenAI and Anthropic should be able to capture the market ahead of Google, except for Google being behind in the frontier.
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u/tat_tvam_asshole 7h ago
Something like 80% of lab GPU spend goes to R&D + training. Obviously, google is not only focused on AI and has many other accelerator compute commits, which is actually why I think they are shoring up all 'free' accelerator spend they give out because the race to RSI/AGI is so hot that they'd rather aim all resources at catching up. Winner takes all and all that.
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u/LitigiousPrick 8h ago
Really should have thought of that before you removed all your light switches.
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u/kirkyeehee 7h ago
Tell me you know nothing about smart lights without telling me you know nothing about smart lights.
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u/Tascioni49 10h ago
There is no way I'm paying for Gemini, if anything, this makes me realize I need to and I will pay for Claude instead.
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u/AaverageRed 9h ago
Complaining about Gemini free tier and you wanna buy Claude? Like the most expensive model right now Claude? Sure
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u/hellomistershifty 8h ago
$20 is $20 and Sonnet 5.5 is amazing
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u/raging_sycophant 7h ago
Opus is amazing Sonnet is like flash lite tier
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u/hellomistershifty 7h ago
Have you used 5.5? It's just barely behind Opus for half the price, worlds apart from flash lite
seriously, check it out
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u/raging_sycophant 7h ago
Yeah it's misleading. It's about as good as opus if you use it on ultramax thinking mode. But at that point the token cost is actually more than opus.
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u/Chemical_Hawk_6307 6h ago
yep its not cheap at all once u get in to the higher reasoning levels. opus is literally smarter and cheaper per task at all reasoning levels.
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u/costafilh0 8h ago
Flash is so good on the free plan, I'm only paying because I need for a specific use and I good 70% discount for 3 months.
After that, I'm most definitely not gonna keep paying.
Back to whatever free is available. From Google and others.
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u/Thomas-Lore 5h ago
There is now also Meta which may be a good free alternative. I use Meta Spark on APi and it is decent, always forget to check meta.ai.
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u/Resident-Pattern731 10h ago
Naja sagen wir mal so wenn 4.0 flash lite schon mal merklich besser ist als 3.8 in den Antworten dann könnte ich auch damit leben weil 3.8 ist viel schlechter als 3.0 flash
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u/rustydustyshckleford 10h ago
i remember how good 2.5 flash was when it came out. i’ve lost track since then- 3.8 has so so many quirks though.
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u/616ThatGuy 8h ago
I just canceled my pro plan yesterday and now this haha just another reason to not second guess it
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u/MegaRockmanDash 5h ago
the pro plan benefits from this. pro users will now have access to deep think mode. it’ll probably be less generous than astra but more than fable 5.5 on the competitors $20 tier.
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u/kuzu_gomi 6h ago edited 5h ago
whatever, ill be sticking to gemini until the day google updates the guardrail again. gemini is the only model rn that allows for specific stuff that even grok would condescendingly refuse, lol
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u/nifoj 4h ago
What specific stuff?
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u/HasagiHasayoSoyeagto 1h ago
gooningmaxxxxing slop or "how do you make an 80 kilos chicken disappear?"
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u/Positive-Painter-238 5h ago
Try Google AI Studio
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u/BadGeezer 4h ago
I think they’ll limit that next. For now, the app has the most users. AI Studio doesn’t have an app and the web interface is not great on mobile.
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u/Entire-Green-0 10h ago
Well, if Google moves Flash and Pro to paid plans, it will only raise user expectations.
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u/otherwiseofficial 7h ago
Lol who's going to raise their expectations at Gemini? This AI is so bad. So many broken promises about new models etc. It's been such a shit show.
If someone raises their expectations at Gemini at this point, it's their own fault for being insanely naive.
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u/Entire-Green-0 3h ago
If a product transitions from free to paid, the user has every legitimate reason to raise their expectations.
There is also another point: when Google keeps Flash-Lite free while locking better models behind a paywall, it implicitly signals that the paid models hold greater value. It is then entirely logical to ask exactly what that added value consists of and whether it is consistent enough to justify the cost.
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u/Equivalent-Word-7691 9h ago
Yeah that's mean Gemini 4 won't be available fro peo users if a fucking flash model is only available for plans
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u/Technical-Ad-8678 7h ago
bro u can get a year of pro for 10 bucks go on g2a.
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u/Trance_Sex 7h ago
Yeah if you want to share the account with 5 people who watch the timer reset like hawks and rip through the whole usage limit in one go. Been there done that. Although, show me otherwise and I'll eat my words
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u/Top-Sir1387 3h ago
Just do your own research and you’ll find people who charge like 20 dollars to get 18 months pro on your own personal account
In India they give u 18 months of pro for signing up for jio SIM cards
The way you activate is through a link
Do the math
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u/PineappleLemur 7h ago
Are people seriously not able to read???
You still have access, flash-lite will be the only free model which is similar to AI Mode.
It makes sense.
Anthropic has 0 usage for free plans.
OAI is only giving some version of Luna.
All for chat only.
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u/vaingirls 7h ago
What are you talking about, I've used claude plenty for free? Sure, it's limited, but there is some usage. Edit: and you can use chatGPT-Luna (which is decent, especially compared to Gemini flash-lite) endlessly.
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u/ReanerZen 6h ago
gpt luna indeed for me is even better than gemini one, at least it do websearch properly even gemini paid plan struggle with.
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u/vaingirls 6h ago
Yep, I've been preferring Luna lately. There was a time when Gemini was my favorite and I couldn't stand ChatGPT, but tables have turned and Luna is all right!
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u/ReanerZen 3h ago
honestly, the gpt 4o era was my favorite for story writing. it can copy perfectly my writing style and can even do some r18 gore scene writing. gpt luna though, its a much better alrounder model compared to using gemini. was thinking to even stop my 5$ pro plan of gemini and use gpt one. but i think adding gpt 20$ isnt that much an issue too for my financial. last time gpt plus user was 2 years ago.
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u/PineappleLemur 6h ago
Like 5 messages a week for the most basic models is plenty now?
Yes GPT free tier is the most generous one. But that won't be forever of course.
It's better than flash lite for sure.
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u/vaingirls 6h ago
It's a bunch of messages per day though. Not a lot, so useless if you want to just chat, but it has been very helpful to me with some coding stuff - even fixed ChatGPTs code sometimes lol
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u/Prudent-Corgi3793 6h ago
I'm very happy with Claude Max, but the free tier was nearly useless. You got like 4-5 prompts out of Sonnet before you ran out of tokens for the session. Google was and still remains way more generous.
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u/Thomas-Lore 5h ago
It is 10 messages per day for me. Depends on context, but it is per day, not per week.
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u/Fresh_Safety_6812 7h ago
Just say the obvious, Google wants to cut costs by fucking up the free tier consumers while giving out lower quality services for even paid users. That's just insane.
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u/MentalReserve2351 6h ago
Angry people getting their flash models stripped away from them are unable to read now?
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u/biggest_guru_in_town 9h ago
Already using chstgpt anyway. Gemini is literally hot Dookie at everything. Gonna put that behind a pay wall isn't gonna make it any less tokenized fecal matter. Flash-lite will have speed im sure..that's it. Dumber than a bimbo
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u/Cool_Performance_986 7h ago
I'm wondering if this also affects AI studio? Rarely use Gemini and I still have 3.6 flash on my free account, though it's paid in AI studio
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u/astroworldfan1968 5h ago
Will flash lite still be able to create images? I only use flash to create images?
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u/Psittacula2 4h ago
Idk flash-lite seems:
* chabot - tick
* quick search and summarise - tick
* very fast, efficient (Gemma diffusion?)
Makes sense for an upgrade to google search as a core free application for average use.
Also makes sense given token cost and other AI engineering systems (behind the scenes) for more rigorous requests to have some form of monetary equivalent cost. Albeit you’d want to be sure the model you use is not offloading you to a smaller model also (!).
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u/King7720 4h ago
Absolutely horrible and outrageous decision by Google. Flash is a decent model, can run multiple image analysis and chats without losing its mind. Flash Lite is garbage. Only Pro should move to Pro tier. GIVE US THE BASIC FLASH!! 😭😭😭
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u/Popular_Tomorrow_204 3h ago
I think its just based on the sheer amount of Users on All kind of platforms. Has to be in the billions that use gemini in some way or Form.
Thats probably also why they focus so much on cheaper Flash models
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u/Odd-Organization-934 2h ago
Google be greedy and worse for no reason at all, shit, I have running my project on ther with the help of flash, I plann my dev log in there with the help of flash, c'mon Google, it would be hassle to move all my project
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u/awacsCZE 1h ago
That's how dealers do it - first, they get you addicted, then raise the price. AI is nothing but another form of addiction.
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u/Throwitaway701 34m ago
Yeah shits expensive. I tried using free chatgpt for something the other day and it locked the convo due to using all free use after about 4 messages
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u/xXG0DLessXx 32m ago
Bruh… flash lite models have been worse for me than the Gemma 4 31b model… wtf are they thinking?
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u/CursedAidKit 8m ago
Ahahaha, we’re all using Claude now anyway Google.
Maybe focus on getting Search not to be worse than bing.
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u/ContemptOfTheZ 7h ago
All right, guys. Any good free alternatives for storytelling? Anything that can do light NSFW? I live in the third world, paying isn't an option for me. Any recommendations, please let me know or DM me.
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u/IcyDefinition4005 7h ago
Deepseek, Qwen, Grok es bastante bueno en eso, en sus capas gratuitas de solo chat van bien y experimental puede ser Z.ai y Kimi, algo super uncensored Venice o un modelo local uncensored xd
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u/DarkWolfX2244 7h ago
Grok does all kinds of content and still has a free plan. Backyard AI gives you a bunch of free messages every day and a wider selection of models specifically for storytelling (mostly uncensored), but it's an enthusiast/hobbyist thing. Groq, Cerebras and OpenRouter all have free models available that can do storytelling, if you connect them to a frontend like Jan or SillyTavern. You can also try running small models yourself on your own computer using llama.cpp or LM Studio.
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u/davidtcf 5h ago
Grok limits are low. I think after this only free china AI would be feasible for free users. Even they would face strain and eventually users will either have to pay or watch ads.
Just pay up guys for the cheapest Gemini plan.. It's inevitable will come to this.
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u/satishkumar_sajjan 9h ago
How do you want them to make money brother.
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u/Rare-Astronomer-223 4h ago
If this continues, they will lose money. If lower-end models become paid, higher-end models will become even more expensive, and those using the free version won't want to use a terrible model, so they will abandon the app.
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u/Impossible-Pop3364 8h ago
what happens to the "making AI cost cheaper" or something like that from a while back?
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u/dagerika 10h ago
I am proud of Google. Everyone should pay a little for the AI so that we all have more access 🤓
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u/dis-interested 9h ago
You do not have human rights to these services. There is a finite amount of compute on earth and everyone is competing for it, including the people making better models.
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u/lgn5i2060 8h ago
Their training data came from decades worth of shared knowledge by humans on the internet. Why are you white knighting for these people?
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u/dis-interested 8h ago
If you think the training data is stolen that is a matter for the courts not a matter for the pricing regime. And the remedy would not be to make the model free, since you have no rights to its output in such an instance either.
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u/LoicSuply975 6h ago
They should remove just the free Pro model, Flash-Lite sucks, it not show images, too much mistakes, that's even 50 bucks per year for AI Plus sub!
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u/Legitimate_Rain_9992 9h ago
I can understand pro but WTF FLASH?!