I really want Google to launch a Claude Code/OpenAI Codex CLI alternative. also if they included a small VM in one of these subscriptions I'd seriously consider it!
And Altman said their $200/mo plan still ultimately loses them money, so expect the level of service you get for that amount to eventually go down, and even more expensive subscriptions to slot in above.
I’m not interested in about 75% of this offering. Really wish they had pieced this out or done a credit system for it all. I want higher coding and LLM limits, Deep Think, and would like to try agent stuff, but don’t care at all about image or video generation, Notebook limits, YouTube Premium, or more storage.
$250 is a the highest cost AI sub now. Not loving this direction.
I wonder how long this free access to LLMs can continue. It's like early days of Facebook, before the ads and political interference started to happen. The question is, when will we see the enshittification of LLMs?
Building and running these models is expensive, there's no way around that in the near future.
LLM companies have just been eating the cost in hopes that people find them useful enough while drastically subsidized that they stay on the hook when prices actually cover the expense.
At $125/mo for 3 months I'm tempted to try it, but I don't understand how it would interfere with my existing youtube/2TB storage family plan, and that's a big barrier for me.
To be clear, 8hrs/day, 40hrs/week, 50weeks/year is about 2,000 hours. Are you really saying that "senior developers" make 250USD * 2,000 = 500K USD? 250K is more like it, and only in very high cost locations -- Silicon Valley or NYC. More like 150K in rich countries, but not the richest city. Hell, 100K EUR can get you some very good developers on the European continent.
Hmm, interesting. There's basically no information what makes Ultra worth that much money in concrete terms except "more quota". One interesting tidbid I've noticed is that it seems Google One (or what is it called now) also carries sub for youtube. So far, I'm still on "old" Google One for my family and myself storage and have a separate youtube subscription for the same. I still haven't seen a clear upgrade path, or even a discount based on how much I have left from the old subscription, if I ever choose to do so (why?).
edit: also google AI Ultra links leads to AI Pro and there's no Ultra to choose from. GG Google, as always with their "launches".
I believe Imagen 4 and Veo 3 (the newest image/video models) and the "deep think" variant are for Ultra only. (Is it worth it? It's a different question.)
The problem with all of these is that SOTA models keep changing. I thought about getting OpenAI's Pro subscription, and then Gemini flew ahead and was free. If I get this then sooner or later OpenAI or Anthropic will be back on top.
The Gemini 2.5 Pro 05/06 release by Google’s own reported benchmarks was worse in 10/12 cases than the 3/25 version. Google re routed all traffic for the 3/25 checkpoint to the 05/06 version in the API.
I’m also unsure who needs all of these expanded quotas because the old Gemini subscription had higher quotas than I could ever anticipate using.
I have the same concerns. To push people to the ultra tier and get their bonuses their going to use dark patterns.
The only reason I maintain Claude and OpenAi subscriptions is because I expect Google to pull the rug on what has been their competitive advantage since Gemini 2.5.
Have you also noticed a degradation in quality over long chat sessions? I've noticed it in NotebookLM specifically, but not Gemini 2.5. I anticipate this to become the standard, your chat degrades subtly over time.
This 100%. Unless you are building a product around the latest models and absolutely must squeeze the latest available oomph, it's more advantageous to just wait a little bit.
I am willing to pay for up to 2 models at a time but I am constantly swapping subscriptions around. I think I'd started and cancelled GPT and Claude subscriptions at least 3-4 times each.
I wonder if there's an opportunity here to abstract away these subscription costs and offer a consistent interface and experience?
For example - what if someone were to start a company around a fork of LiteLLM? https://litellm.ai/
LiteLLM, out of the box, lets you create a number of virtual API keys. Each key can be assigned to a user or a team, and can be granted access to one or more models (and their associated keys). Models are configured globally, but can have an arbitrary number of "real" and "virtual" keys.
Then you could sell access to a host of primary providers - OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Groq, Grok, etc. - through a single API endpoint and key. Users could switch between them by changing a line in a config file or choosing a model from a dropdown, depending on their interface.
Assuming you're able to build a reasonable userbase, presumably you could then contract directly with providers for wholesale API usage. Pricing would be tricky, as part of your value prop would be abstracting away marginal costs, but I strongly suspect that very few people are actually consuming the full API quotas on these $200+ plans. Those that are are likely to be working directly with the providers to reduce both cost and latency, too.
The other value you could offer is consistency. Your engineering team's core mission would be providing a consistent wrapper for all of these models - translating between OpenAI-compatible, Llama-style, and Claude-style APIs on the fly.
Is there already a company doing this? If not, do you think this is a good or bad idea?
I think the biggest hurdle would be complying with the TOS. Imagine that OpenAI etc would not be a fan of sharing quotas across individuals in this way
You can just surf between Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, etc. using them for free. I can't see paying for any AI subscription at this point as the free models out there are quite good and are updated every few months (at least).
I wonder why anyone would pay these days, unless its using features outside of the chatbot. Between Claude, ChatGPT, Mistral, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Deepseek and son on, how do you ever really run out of free "wannabe pro"?
I hate hate hate putting Deep Think behind a paywall. It's an ease-of-use tax. I fully expect to be able to get it over API through Poe or similar for way cheaper.
I suspect Google sees the writing on the wall, and needs to move to a more subscription based business model. I don't think the ad model of the internet is dead, but I also don't think it was particularly successful. People block ads rather than forgo those services, ads conditioned people to think everything on the internet is free, and the actual monetization of ad views makes people pretty uncomfortable.
So here we are, with Google now wading into the waters of subscriptions. It's a good sign for those who are worried about AI manipulating them to buy things, and a bad sign for those who like the ad model.
Is the future going to be everyone has an AI plan, just like a phone plan, or internet plan, that they shell out $30-$300/mo to use?
I honestly would greatly prefer it if it meant privacy, but many people seem to greatly prefer the ad-model or ad-subsidized model.
ETA: Subscription with ads is ad-subsidized. You pay less but watch more ads.
No idea if this is right but based on AI summary google results, annual operating costs for Youtube is ~$3B-5B and Netflix is ~$25B-30B. While YT probably spends most on CDN/bandwidth, they have a mostly free content cost which is by far Netflix's largest expense
I think this is a bit too rose tinted glasses. Being a paying customer doesn't necessarily mean you won't get ads, look at Netflix for a start. Their cheapest paid tier still gets ads. The subscription model will be an addition to the ad revenue, not a replacement.
Anyone can say A should mean B, that doesn't mean it's obviously true.
Very few services still commercially viable today actually force ads - meaning there is no paid tier available that removes them entirely.
I don't particularly like ads but this idea that any advertisement at any point for any good or service is by definition a cancer is a fringe idea, and a pretty silly one at that.
I wonder how viable the referral link/referrer code method is? Based on my own YouTube viewing habits it seems like a lot of prominent channels have gone that route. Seems like it could work for the web overall. Ads would no longer have to target via cookies or browsing history because you could just serve links or offer codes related to your site's content.
I mean that in that I don't think it lived up to what Google envisioned. People have extremely hostile views towards ads but have a full expectation that everything is just an account creation away, if not outright just given away.
30% of people who use Google don't view their ads. It's hard to call a business where 30% of people don't pay successful. The news agencies picked up on this years ago, and now it's all paywalls.
This doesn't even get into the downstream effects of needing to coax people into spending more time on the platform in order to view more ads.
Google ads revenue AND income has consistently risen basically forever. Its ~75% of Alphabets total revenue and corresponds to over ~%50% of all Ad revenue in the world.
Heh, although I'm a cheapskate, the ad-based world is a fucked up one. We now have an attention-economy, trying to keep you hooked on the content so "the platform" can serve you ads and earn money off you. And they do that by serving content that engages you, and apparently it's content that stirs up a lot of emotions.
"Worried about refugees? Here's some videos about refugees being terrible". Replace "refugee" with "people celebrating Genocide", etc, etc...
These prices are nuts, in my opinion. It basically means that only companies can afford access to the latest offerings - this used to be the case for specialist software in the past (e.g., in the medical sector), but AI has the potential to be useful for anyone.
And I think it is a good thing. If there are buyers, it means they are getting that much value out of it. That there is a market for it. Competition will bring prices down.
> Competition will do its thing and bring prices down.
It won't. For now the AI "market" is artificially distorted by billionaires and trillion-dollar companies dumping insane amount of cash into NVDA, but when the money spigot dries out (which it inevitably will) prices are going to skyrocket and stay there for a loooong time.
Who do you think is paying to train those open models? The notable ones are all released by VC-funded startups or gigacorps which are losing staggering amounts of money to make each new release happen. If nobody is making a profit from closed models then what hope do the companies releasing open models have when the money spigot runs dry?
The open models which have already been released can't be taken back now of course, but it would be foolish to assume that SOTA freebies will keep coming forever.
It won't be the end of the world if the 'progress' were to slow down a little, I have trouble keeping up with what's available as it is - much less tinkering with it all
It will because "keeping up" is the sleight of hand. By constantly tweaking the model you don't ever notice anything it's consistently wrong about. If they "slowed progress" you'd notice.
> How will prices skyrocket when there is a flood of open models?
Easy: once the money spigot runs out and/or a proprietary model has a quality/featureset that other open-weight models can't match, it's game over. The open-weight models cost probably dozens of millions of dollars to train, this is not sustainable.
And that's just training cost - inference costs are also massively subsidized by the money spigot, so the price for end users will go up from that alone as well.
ChatGPT is insanely subsidized. The $20/month sub is such a great value. Just the image gen is about $0.25 a pop through the API. That's 80 image generations for $20.
I think that's a great example of how a competitive market drives these costs to zero. When solid modeling software was new Pro/ENGINEER cost ~$100k/year. Today the much more capable PTC Creo costs $3-$30k depending on the features you want and SOLIDWORKS has full features down to $220/month or $10/month for non-professionals.
Off-topic, but I work 'around' PTC software, and am surprised to see them mentioned. Got much knowledge in the area?
On-topic, yeah. PTC sells "Please Call Us" software that, in Windchill's example, is big and chunky enough to where people keep service contracts in place for the stuff. But, the cost is justifiable to companies when the Windchill software can "Just Do PLM", and make their job of designing real, physical products so much more effective, relative to not having PLM.
I only worked with it decades ago. At the time, the split between wages, software, and hardware was about equal. Then the computers became free, and the software has been getting cheaper all the time.
> It basically means that only companies can afford access to the latest offerings
The $20/month plan provides similar access. They hint that in the future the most intense reasoning models will be in the Ultra plan (at least at first). Paying more for the most intense models shouldn't be surprising.
There's plenty of affordable LLM access out there.
I would agree, were I to use flow frequently; but I would guess it’s the most operationally expensive API for Google and they may be subsidizing it (and profit in general) via users that don’t use it (ie software developers).
Would love to know how many people end up on this plan.
If i had to guess, looking at the features I would have guessed 80 bucks. Absurdly high, but lots of little doodads and prototypes would make the price understandable at that price.
250?!
I actually find that price worrying because it points to a degree of unsustainability in the economics of the products weve gotten used to.
Price point here is a bit too high... They have bundled so many things together into this that the sticker shock on the price is too much.
I get what they're trying to do but if they were serious about this they would include some other small subscriptions as well... I should get some number of free movies on YouTube per month, I should be able to cancel a bunch of my other subscriptions... I should get free data with this or a free phone or something... I could see some value if I could actually just have one subscription but I'm not going to spend $250 a month on just another subscription to add to the pile...
I’m not seeing the relevance of YouTube and the One services to this at all.
I get that Big Tech loves to try to pull you into their orbit whenever you use one of their services, but this risks alienating customers who won’t use those unrelated services and may begrudge Google making them pay for them.
It's trying to normalise it, make it just another part of your Google experience, alongside (and integrated with) your other Google tools. (Though that's weakened a bit by calling it 'AI Pro/Ultra' imo.)
I imagine this could be seen as an anticompetitive lever. Whereby Google is using its dominance in one field to reduce competition in another, adding it here is a way to normalise that addition for when massmarket-priced plans become available.
Tucking it towards the end of the list doesn't change that.
I can’t see a way that anyone would be able to give uncapped access to these models for a fixed price (unless you mean it’s scoped to your own use and not for company use? Even then, that’s still a risk to the provider.)
I use Msty a lot for personal use. I like its ability to fork conversations. Seems like a simple feature but even ChatGPT's UI, which everyone has tried to copy, is fairly limited by comparison.
As a consumer it seems to me the low hanging fruit for these super-premium offerings is some substantial amount of API credits included every month. Back when API credits were a relatively new thing I used LLMs infrequently enough I just paid $5-10/mo for API credits and used a desktop UI to talk to ChatGPT.
Now they want $200, $250/mo which is borderline offensive, and you have to pay for any API use on top of that?
Putting API use into the monthly plans doesn't make a lot of business sense. The only people who would sign up specifically to use API requests on a monthly plan would be looking to have a lower overall bill, then they'd pay-per-request after that. It would be a net loss.
Technically more than one could use this subscription, if used through the same device. Also to make it available to users in not yet supported countries.
I can't decide how I feel about Google's design for this looking so Apple-y.
Didn't they just release Material Design Expressive a few days ago [1]? Instead of bold shapes, bold fonts and solid colors it gradients, simple lines, frosted glass, and a single, clean, sans-serif font here. The bento-box slides look quite Apple-y too [2]. Switch the Google Sans for SF Pro, pull back on the border radius a bit, and you've essentially got the Apple look. It does look great though.
it makes sense if you believe that Google has zero business interest in UI/UX.
they've learned that they can shovel out pretty much anything and as long as they don't directly charge the end-user and they're able to put ads on it (or otherwise monetize it against the interest of the end user), they just don't care.
they've been criticized for years and years over their lack of standardization and relatively poorly-informed design choices especially when compared with Apple's HIG.
If anyone at Google cares, I’d pay for Gemini Pro (not this new $200+ ridiculousness) if they didn’t train on my chats in that case. I actually would like to subscribe..
And lots of other features don't work, particularly external integrations. Gemini on Android refuses to do basic things like set a timer unless chat history is enabled. It is the one key feature I really want to pay extra to get, and that preference goes x2 when the AI provider is Google.
And from a business perspective, this is enabling people from solo freelancers to mid managers and others for a fraction of the time and cost required to outsource to humans.
Not that I am personally in favor of this, but I can very much see the economics in these offerings.
The target market for these offerings are corporations, or self-employed developers. If these tools really do make your developers more productive, $250 a month is easily justifiable. That's only $3000 per year, a fraction of the cost of a full time developer.
Obviously, the benefit is contingent on whether or not the models actually make your developers more productive.
Yup, I was paying $225/mo for three Unity3D subscriptions (basic+iOS+Android) ten years ago, while earning less than $4k/mo – just considered it part of my self-employed expenses.
The goal is to capture all your disposable AI income, so they can starve the competitors. The goal is, as long as you subscribe to several, increase the price.
Apart from clients that usually are not stupid, you still need to understand requirements to guide the ai in a possible right direction. I don't usually understand boss tickets at first look, very often we need to discuss them, i doubt an ai could despite the hype
This isn't a luxury purchase. If you aren't able to increase your income by $250/mo using these tools or otherwise get $250/mo worth of value out of them then you shouldn't sign up.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadThe Claude Code UX is nice imo, but i didn't get the impression Jules is that.
Yea that's my big problem with expensive subscriptions. If i buy 2.5 Pro today who knows what i'll be in a month.
$250 is a the highest cost AI sub now. Not loving this direction.
However if all this power is wasted on video generation, then even them probably will choke.
Then again, I guess your average Joe/Jane will looove to generate some 10 seconds of you daily whatsapp stuff to share.
LLM companies have just been eating the cost in hopes that people find them useful enough while drastically subsidized that they stay on the hook when prices actually cover the expense.
I, personally, try to stay as far as possible from google: Kagi for search, Brave for browsing (Firefox previously), Pro on OpenAI, etc.
We’ll see how fair OpenAI will be with tracking and what have you (given “off” for improve for everyone), but Google? Nah.
It seems weird to me, they included entertainment service in „work” related plan.
edit: also google AI Ultra links leads to AI Pro and there's no Ultra to choose from. GG Google, as always with their "launches".
The Gemini 2.5 Pro 05/06 release by Google’s own reported benchmarks was worse in 10/12 cases than the 3/25 version. Google re routed all traffic for the 3/25 checkpoint to the 05/06 version in the API.
I’m also unsure who needs all of these expanded quotas because the old Gemini subscription had higher quotas than I could ever anticipate using.
"Google AI Ultra" is a consumer offering though, there's no API to have quotas for?
The only reason I maintain Claude and OpenAi subscriptions is because I expect Google to pull the rug on what has been their competitive advantage since Gemini 2.5.
Have you also noticed a degradation in quality over long chat sessions? I've noticed it in NotebookLM specifically, but not Gemini 2.5. I anticipate this to become the standard, your chat degrades subtly over time.
The Gemini subscription is monthly, so not too much lock-in if you want to change later.
For example - what if someone were to start a company around a fork of LiteLLM? https://litellm.ai/
LiteLLM, out of the box, lets you create a number of virtual API keys. Each key can be assigned to a user or a team, and can be granted access to one or more models (and their associated keys). Models are configured globally, but can have an arbitrary number of "real" and "virtual" keys.
Then you could sell access to a host of primary providers - OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Groq, Grok, etc. - through a single API endpoint and key. Users could switch between them by changing a line in a config file or choosing a model from a dropdown, depending on their interface.
Assuming you're able to build a reasonable userbase, presumably you could then contract directly with providers for wholesale API usage. Pricing would be tricky, as part of your value prop would be abstracting away marginal costs, but I strongly suspect that very few people are actually consuming the full API quotas on these $200+ plans. Those that are are likely to be working directly with the providers to reduce both cost and latency, too.
The other value you could offer is consistency. Your engineering team's core mission would be providing a consistent wrapper for all of these models - translating between OpenAI-compatible, Llama-style, and Claude-style APIs on the fly.
Is there already a company doing this? If not, do you think this is a good or bad idea?
I'll investigate. Thanks!
Have you tried say O1 Pro Mode? And if you have, do you find it as good as whatever free models you use?
If you haven't, it's kind of weird to do the comparison without actually having tried it.
If you don't really have a problem to solve and you're just chatting, then "good" is just, like, your vibe, man.
Why? Define it however you want, it's the comparison I'm interested in, regardless of the minute details of their definition.
Just have usage limit tiers!
I blew through my $40 monthly fee in Github Copilot Pro+ in a few hours. =^/
So here we are, with Google now wading into the waters of subscriptions. It's a good sign for those who are worried about AI manipulating them to buy things, and a bad sign for those who like the ad model.
Is the future going to be everyone has an AI plan, just like a phone plan, or internet plan, that they shell out $30-$300/mo to use?
I honestly would greatly prefer it if it meant privacy, but many people seem to greatly prefer the ad-model or ad-subsidized model.
ETA: Subscription with ads is ad-subsidized. You pay less but watch more ads.
Unlike platform ads which disable video control while the ad is playing.
SponsorBlock for YouTube resolves the issue.
Ads are well and truly the cancer on the service industry.
It’s an outright abuse to force ads and then make you pay for the bandwidth of those ads on your own plan to render them.
Very few services still commercially viable today actually force ads - meaning there is no paid tier available that removes them entirely.
I don't particularly like ads but this idea that any advertisement at any point for any good or service is by definition a cancer is a fringe idea, and a pretty silly one at that.
I don’t there was a claim that nobody would ever offer a partially subscription partially ad funded service.
Only on HN.
30% of people who use Google don't view their ads. It's hard to call a business where 30% of people don't pay successful. The news agencies picked up on this years ago, and now it's all paywalls.
This doesn't even get into the downstream effects of needing to coax people into spending more time on the platform in order to view more ads.
Google ads revenue AND income has consistently risen basically forever. Its ~75% of Alphabets total revenue and corresponds to over ~%50% of all Ad revenue in the world.
"Worried about refugees? Here's some videos about refugees being terrible". Replace "refugee" with "people celebrating Genocide", etc, etc...
Not the people who haven't been trained to require the crutch.
Not a good development.
It won't. For now the AI "market" is artificially distorted by billionaires and trillion-dollar companies dumping insane amount of cash into NVDA, but when the money spigot dries out (which it inevitably will) prices are going to skyrocket and stay there for a loooong time.
The open models which have already been released can't be taken back now of course, but it would be foolish to assume that SOTA freebies will keep coming forever.
Current AI is Fast Fashion for computer people.
What I can afford right now is literally the ~20 EUR / month claude.ai pro subscription, and it works quite well for me.
Easy: once the money spigot runs out and/or a proprietary model has a quality/featureset that other open-weight models can't match, it's game over. The open-weight models cost probably dozens of millions of dollars to train, this is not sustainable.
And that's just training cost - inference costs are also massively subsidized by the money spigot, so the price for end users will go up from that alone as well.
I think that's a great example of how a competitive market drives these costs to zero. When solid modeling software was new Pro/ENGINEER cost ~$100k/year. Today the much more capable PTC Creo costs $3-$30k depending on the features you want and SOLIDWORKS has full features down to $220/month or $10/month for non-professionals.
On-topic, yeah. PTC sells "Please Call Us" software that, in Windchill's example, is big and chunky enough to where people keep service contracts in place for the stuff. But, the cost is justifiable to companies when the Windchill software can "Just Do PLM", and make their job of designing real, physical products so much more effective, relative to not having PLM.
The $20/month plan provides similar access. They hint that in the future the most intense reasoning models will be in the Ultra plan (at least at first). Paying more for the most intense models shouldn't be surprising.
There's plenty of affordable LLM access out there.
I do not know what that hate about 250 $ is, just flow is worth more.
If i had to guess, looking at the features I would have guessed 80 bucks. Absurdly high, but lots of little doodads and prototypes would make the price understandable at that price.
250?!
I actually find that price worrying because it points to a degree of unsustainability in the economics of the products weve gotten used to.
(Comment is on the horrible naming; good naming schemes plan ahead for next month's offerings)
I get what they're trying to do but if they were serious about this they would include some other small subscriptions as well... I should get some number of free movies on YouTube per month, I should be able to cancel a bunch of my other subscriptions... I should get free data with this or a free phone or something... I could see some value if I could actually just have one subscription but I'm not going to spend $250 a month on just another subscription to add to the pile...
They got Youtube Premium which is like 15$. 30TB of storage, a bit excessive and no equivalent but 20TB is around 100$ a month.
I get that Big Tech loves to try to pull you into their orbit whenever you use one of their services, but this risks alienating customers who won’t use those unrelated services and may begrudge Google making them pay for them.
Tucking it towards the end of the list doesn't change that.
Now they want $200, $250/mo which is borderline offensive, and you have to pay for any API use on top of that?
Didn't they just release Material Design Expressive a few days ago [1]? Instead of bold shapes, bold fonts and solid colors it gradients, simple lines, frosted glass, and a single, clean, sans-serif font here. The bento-box slides look quite Apple-y too [2]. Switch the Google Sans for SF Pro, pull back on the border radius a bit, and you've essentially got the Apple look. It does look great though.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352
[2]: https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-app-updates-io-20...
they've learned that they can shovel out pretty much anything and as long as they don't directly charge the end-user and they're able to put ads on it (or otherwise monetize it against the interest of the end user), they just don't care.
they've been criticized for years and years over their lack of standardization and relatively poorly-informed design choices especially when compared with Apple's HIG.
Not included: Perplexity, Openrouter, Cursor, etc
Wow. You gotta have lots of disposable income.
And from a business perspective, this is enabling people from solo freelancers to mid managers and others for a fraction of the time and cost required to outsource to humans.
Not that I am personally in favor of this, but I can very much see the economics in these offerings.
Obviously, the benefit is contingent on whether or not the models actually make your developers more productive.
And you haven’t strung the price that stings yet.