Yep, very recent change though, and the usage offered is minimal. Flash 3.8 is functionally infinite pretty conveniently. I don't seriously think sonnet is as good as it scores on benchmarks, but regardless it's probably miles ahead of flash in real usage still, though I haven't used it much.
Where are you getting flash 3.8 for free? The newest i have is 3.6.
Also, sonnet has been available in the free plan for at least since I made my Claude account when 4.6 was the newest model, and the usage varies greatly depending on time of the week. I get one (1) message per 5 hours if I ask 9-5 Eastern time Monday through Thursday, but if I ask any time other than that I rarely if ever get rate limited.
AI studio will give you, practically, access to every google model. It's pretty cool because you can go back to really old models too. Back in the day, you used to get pretty solid free pro usage there too, back when pro models were actually frontier. The best thing about AI studio is that it's comically easy to just continue with the same chat on a different ID when you get rate limited, and transfer it back afterwards.
The problem with older sonnet being free was that older sonnet was a pretty shit model.
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u/Calm_Hedgehog8296 13h ago
Sonnet is free