Gemini free or AI Plus? What you still get (October 2026)
If you use Gemini for free, starting Thursday 9 October you are getting a smaller model. Google is moving free users to Flash-Lite, the lightest model in the family. Flash and Pro are disappearing from the free plan.
Anyone paying 4.99 euros a month for Google AI Plus is giving something up too: Pro is going away, Flash stays. Pro is now only in AI Pro and AI Ultra.
The source is not a blog post or a release note, but a help article on changed model access. The Decoder picked it up on 4 October. We checked everything against Google’s own pages, looked up on 5 October 2026.
All Gemini subscriptions at a glance
| Plan | Price per month (Belgium, VAT included) | Models after the change | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | €0 | Flash-Lite | currently 3.6 Flash and limited 3.1 Pro; from 9 October only Flash-Lite |
| AI Plus | €4.99 | Flash-Lite and Flash | loses Pro; date to follow by email |
| AI Pro | €21.99 | Flash-Lite, Flash and Pro | keeps everything, gets Deep Think as well |
| AI Ultra | €99.99 or €219.99 | Flash-Lite, Flash and Pro | keeps everything, Deep Think was already included |
Sources: Google’s help article on the change, the Belgian subscription page and Google’s explainer on limits per plan, checked on 5 October 2026.
Which version of each model you get, Google does not say in the new overview: it names only Flash-Lite, Flash and Pro. Today the app runs on 3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro, as shown on the subscription page and in the release notes.
Note: on 5 October, Google’s own pages still contradict each other. The subscription page still promises the free plan access to 3.6 Flash and various levels of access to 3.1 Pro. The limits page gives every plan, including free, “Gemini 3 Flash-lite”, “Gemini 3 Flash” and “Gemini 3 Pro”, and calls Deep Think “AI Ultra only”. We follow the help article on the change, because it is the newest and most specific source. The old pages describe the situation until 9 October.
The help article changes nothing about usage limits. Gemini measures your use in compute, with a counter that resets every five hours until you hit your weekly limit. AI Plus gives twice as much as free, AI Pro four times as much, AI Ultra five or twenty times as much as AI Pro.
Gemini free: from 9 October, Flash-Lite only
From 9 October, Flash-Lite will answer. Google describes that model as “ideal for everyday tasks like summarization and brainstorming”. Rewriting an email or scaling a recipe works fine with it. It is not built for long documents and tricky reasoning. Your context window, how much text Gemini can read at once, was already the smallest anyway: 32,000 tokens, versus 128,000 with AI Plus and 1 million with AI Pro and Ultra.
What you keep for free, according to Google’s feature overview: Deep Research, Canvas, Gems, image generation with Nano Banana 2 and music. Gemini Live also sits on the free plan on the subscription page. The Skills that will replace your Gems from November work without a subscription too. How that switch unfolds, you can read in our guide to Gems and Skills.
Google AI Plus: Flash stays, Pro goes
You keep Flash, but Pro disappears. When exactly, Google will tell you by email. If you hit your limit, you work on with Flash-Lite, like on every paid plan. Making videos, the daily briefing, scheduled actions and 400 GB of storage stay.
Is it still worth it? AI Plus was the cheapest paid entry point among the three big chatbots, and strong because you also got some Pro for 4.99 euros. That argument goes away. What is left: Flash instead of Flash-Lite, twice as much usage, four times as large a context window, Gemini in Gmail and 400 GB of storage.
Are you already paying for extra Google storage? Then it stays a reasonable deal: you already pay part of that price for 400 GB alone. Do you mainly want a smarter chatbot? Then AI Plus has become less interesting. A real top model you find only at AI Pro. That is 17 euros a month more for one model step.
Google AI Pro and Ultra: Deep Think added
For you, little is changing, and on one point you come out ahead. According to the new help article, both AI Pro and AI Ultra are getting the Deep Think option for “maximum parallel reasoning”. Beyond that, you pick per model an effort level: low, medium or high. The higher, the more thorough the answer and the faster your meter empties. The limits page still talks of “Standard thinking” and “Extended thinking”; Google is lagging behind itself there too.
Live in Belgium? The change applies to personal Google accounts, and the help article makes no exception for Europe. It says nothing about work or school accounts. In the European Economic Area, you must be 18 or older for Gemini with a Google AI subscription.
And ChatGPT Go or Claude Free?
Free Claude gives you Sonnet 5.5, the same middle model as paying users, just with less room; Claude Pro costs 18 euros excluding VAT, see how much Claude costs. OpenAI’s entry plan Go costs 8 euros, does not come with the latest top models and warns itself that ads may be included. Free Gemini is therefore dropping below Claude Free, while AI Plus remains the cheapest paid entry by price. The full comparison, with limits and top plans, sits in our comparison of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
Our take
Google is doing what OpenAI has done for longer: the best model goes behind the paywall, the free plan becomes a trial. That is understandable because Pro answers cost a lot of compute. But the communication is thin: no release note, only a help article, and a subscription page that still promises the old models after the announcement.
The timing stands out. On 30 September, Google introduced Gemini 4 Argon, so far only for a select group of cybersecurity defenders. After that come developers, businesses and consumers, “starting with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers”. So the most expensive plan gets the new top model first. The fact that Google is also slimming down the free plan at the same time fits the same picture: compute goes to whoever pays.
What should you do now? If you use Gemini free for short questions, wait and check after 9 October whether the answers still work for you. If you are paying for AI Plus because you use Pro once in a while, read Google’s email and then decide: stay for the storage, or switch to AI Pro or another mid-tier plan.
