Google slashed its top Gemini AI subscription to $100 from $250 per month, signaling the next AI battle will hinge on price, not raw power.
Gemini Ultra Price Cut
The price reset arrived during Google I/O 2026, the company's annual developer conference held this week in Mountain View.
The new $100 AI Ultra tier targets developers, technical leads and advanced creators.
Google also cut the previous $250 top plan to $200 per month, keeping its capabilities identical.
CEO Sundar Pichai opened the keynote by noting it has been ten years since Google placed AI at the center of its product strategy. The $100 tier offers five times the usage limits of the $20 AI Pro plan, 20 terabytes of cloud storage and beta access to Gemini Spark, a new always-on agent.
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Compute-Based Usage Limits
Alongside the pricing changes, Google scrapped its daily prompt cap and switched to a compute-based metering system. Usage now refreshes every five hours up to a weekly ceiling, mirroring the structure used by ChatGPT and Claude.
Heavy actions such as video generation, deep research and extended thinking will drain compute faster than simple text prompts. Subscribers who hit the cap will be moved to smaller models, while AI Pro and Ultra users can purchase pay-as-you-go credits to keep working.
Industry watchers see the shift as proof that scale and benchmark wins are no longer enough on their own. The conversation among enterprise buyers is moving from experimentation toward measurable return on investment, ITP.net reported.
Sundar Pichai Strategy Shift
For much of the past two years, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google competed mainly on model capability. Pricing, efficiency and practical deployment have now become equally important fronts in the AI race.
Google said Gemini now reaches roughly 900 million monthly users, while AI-powered Search experiences serve more than 2.5 billion users globally. The company also rolled out Gemini 3.5 Flash, designed for faster performance at lower operating costs, particularly for enterprise workloads and autonomous agents.
The pricing move comes after a turbulent stretch for Google's AI lineup. In May 2025, the company introduced the original Ultra tier at $250 per month, then spent the following year expanding paid plans and clarifying usage caps as power users pushed back against opaque limits.
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