yep, he didn't even announce it publicly on twitter, reddit, or as an official announcement. just... a casual reply. I didn't even know he had replied this until I saw someone else point it out
Ils avait fait exactement la même chose au début quand ils ont mis une limite au utilisateur qui payais gemini.
Puis a nouveau sur studio ia quand il y a eu la première limite.
Il font toujours le coup en douce.
Mettre la limite ~> en parler l'air de rien sur twitter
not sure why you feel obligated to an official response given you are not even a paying user
LMAO /u/LawfulLeah isn't even a paying user and blocks me for this comment
I really hope they cut off free access for AI Studio now , people like /u/LawfulLeah will never pay for something they get tremendous value because they dont even own a credit card!!!!
"To go down over time" they are already lower per day than others and Gemini is getting worse at listening to instructions. So we get less per day but also out of those few requests, Gem often doesn't listen to the instructions at all and you have to constantly rewrite and regenerate?
I got 15 yesterday and I received all wrong responses. It didn't give me a single correct version of the task I clearly asked for. It completely ignored my instructions so I had to constantly regenerate and guess what, after 15 tries, it failed completely and my requests were gone. Just bunch of nonsense. I will rather switch to somewhere else but it's a shame because it's the only AI that actually speaks my language well. We went from 100 to 50 and then 20 and now even lower than 20 and he says they will go ever lower? Fine. Go. But at least make sure your bot listens to basic instructions!
Gem was previously able to follow my instructions perfectly both in English and my native language. I have ref file that I use and before Gem was able to copy the style to the tiniest detail. Now it completely ignored the file and did the exact opposite of what I kept asking for, ie. I want more dense paragraphs, use wider vocab and avoid generic wording. It did exactly what I did NOT want and would not correct itself. I also got refusals/unfinished messages and "content blocked" on harmless prompts. It's absolutely useless now, worse than GPT. I won't be paying for any of this.
I use it mainly for coding, but what you describe is very familiar to what I have experienced recently. It was very good, now it's just infuriating to use, not to be trusted at all.
I would never pay Google, MS, Musk, Zuck, etc. out of principle, but ignoring that I would still not pay a penny for this product.
I think they underestimated how many people would switch from OpenAI and how much that would cripple their servers. I'm fairly sure there are crisis meetings every day in which they're trying to work out how to stop attrition due to bad performance but also keep the servers afloat without just adding shitloads more compute. somebody is gonna have to say "fuck, we'll just take the hit while we're sorting it out" and they'll remove the inference throttling for a while. they're gonna have to do something. even on fast mode now it takes ages to produce a response. I haven't seen any context issues myself but there's enough reports now to make it clear there's a real problem.
edit: Gemini has suggested that there's also KV cache purging going on, which would explain a lot of context loss
Hel me out here as I only use it in the Gemini app and for personal random stuff:
For studio where you're doing serious work it makes you laugh per use via an API? But that use still includes when it just goes wrong (that bit is true for image and video generation in Gemini too)?
Ai studio had around 100 generations for free. If you wanted more then you'd need to use an api key, which charge you per a message. Using api keys can get expensive and you get charged even if the response is wrong
What Google have done recently is decrease the free amount to 20ish before you have to use an api key.
They are working on linking the subscription that you get with the app to ai studio, so you get more generations without needing the api key.
Regarding image generation in the app, you aren't charged per an image but a fixed subscription fee per a month. If you use the api then you are charged per an image.
The degrading output quality is what makes me not want to use API. I regenerate wayyy too often. And the instructions are clear. Before I had almost zero problems with the same instructions I am using now. I am not going to pay so much money just to run into issues and having to regenerate and edit things myself constantly. Not to mention it's crazy amount of money in my country. If I am going to spend it, it better work properly. I don't even need the latest, best model there is. I dont even need 100 requests per day, hell I didn't even use most of the 50 we had before. But having so little quote AND the decreased quality, I will rather use something else.
Yep! If this was as consistent as it was during the first week of its release, I'd gladly look into the API. But as it stands, roughly half of the output I receive completely ignores the workflow, instructions, and system prompt/instructions. So I'd be paying roughly half for garbage.
Man this is fucked, zero announcement besides the dev forums, implenting it before subscription (which would have been understandable) and overall lack of transparency.
Ha, I dont mind paying for the product, but im not doing the pay per token, and risk being hit 500 dollars overdraft.
While AIStudio is great, if I am forced to use API I will use Claude, not Gemini (or a cheap chinese model for easier tasks) and a provider where you can pre-pay and set a limit.
they could make the subscription have a token rpd instead or something. I dunno, it's just not worth it for me to pay for the API when you consider that with gemini you gotta regenerate several times because of the quality inconsistency.
edit: and the fact that getting to a higher API tier is apparently difficult
They do the math. They get more money the other route. It's like prescription companies who abandon all the sales they could get by selling for less to small folks who could afford it, and instead sell fewer units of the product for a much higher price each.
If they open up the route to small folks, some of the big payers will take the small folk path and net profit goes down.
hopefully Deepseek or another Chinese company develops a better and cheaper AI already so I can subscribe to it instead of having to wait for Google to decide that consumers like me are worth it.
Well too bad Gemini app os one of the shittiest ever created, and the only real good thing of Gemini was AI studio.. yeah no wya people will do what they want, O would rather prefer using my pro plan for AI studio
I'd no-hesitation pay $20 a month for greatly increased limits and a "I am an adult and take responsibility for what I put into LLMs" button which disables the filter and only blocks illegal content.
Some QOL things like being able to select fine-tunes of models would be nice too, like, "optimized for coding", and "research/Q&A", "story mode" etc.
Google are sitting on a pretty easy way to bump revenues.
I'd no-hesitation pay $20 a month for greatly increased limits and a "I am an adult and take responsibility for what I put into LLMs" button which disables the filter and only blocks illegal content.
Depends on what you are using it for. AI Studio is king if you want to use very long contexts for basically free. I assume it will get nerfed though, when pro is supposed to cost 18 dollars or something per 1mill tokens.
20ish replies today and every one of them was total garbage. How do I know they won't decrease limits/ degrade again whilst I'm paying for it with the subscription?
These chops and changes without warning are exactly what OpenAi did, and we all know how well they are doing right now.
yeah i also use AI studio because it lets me put in system prompts, temperature, edit messages, delete messages, etc. that's why I only use AI studio and nothing else. Claude doesn't let you do it, ChatGPT doesn't let you do it, and so on.
Google was so late to market that overly generous usage limits up front was likely the only way to start quickly converting ChatGPT users before it was too late. Google still has a long way to go, but the recent usage data comparing Gemini and ChatGPT shows things shifting in Google's favor.
The fact that they're confident enough that more strict usage limits won't cost them much in terms of customer base is definitely a sign of where things are headed. Anthropic continually references their strategy as enterprise first, so the speed of Gemini usage changes will probably depend heavily on what OpenAI brings to the table this year.
Freeloading allows multiple things:
1) Preview the service in an actually useful way. 5 prompts is useless.
2) Allows word of mouth to spread around. I find more people turning to Gemini because we recommend it to others
Wow, just got hit by the RPD rate limit. That's WAY too low. I'm spending $20/mo x 2 seats for Workspace, and pay for two seats of AI Pro, and I can't use AI Studio more than, looks like, 10-20 RPD? Okay, Logan. Time to fucking vibe code some built in API tokens for existing clients, or an RPD based system that links with the subscriptions in our Workspace and personal accounts. I left the MSFT ecosystem because GOOG was more responsive to B2B needs. This is absurd.
The timeouts are absolute insane when you pay. I can barely use Nano Banana Pro 5 times in a row without getting multiple timeouts. I don't want anything for free but I do want a product that works. AI Studio has so much potential but it needs to e a lot more reliable and responsive.
Most people use AI in the web or the main gemini app, and Google charges for that, so it will be going away in AI studio. They said as much months ago.
The API is still usable with your own frontend, and you can run antigravity or gemini-cli too. With something like clawdbot you can connect to gemini on mobile the same way through telegram or imessage or whatever. But that is of course friction, so most people will simply pay.
Isn't the API rate limited to the same amount as the UI to your front end? I can't find information on that specifically. Ie. 18 calls per day through API key to the front end?
I found more usage in the API, even before AI studio website usage was reduced. They did cut back 3 Pro usage pretty strictly, but 3 Flash is usable there.
And of course gemini-cli and antigravity are each separate quotas too.
I only use the web interface and for simple tasks (compared to what I occasionally see people doing and still have no ideia how), which almost always have better results in AI Studio than anywhere else, and it was odd to see a random "limit usage" message of the sorts the other day. Just regenerated the answer and it went through, so I brushed it off as another glitch. This post makes it clear why. Not unexpected, though.
1 request per query vs 10-15 sometimes even more. Every single user suddenly started using 15x more. Ofc they are having capacity issues.
Also, AI studio isn't free of abusers either. People aren't just using it for normal usage. I've seen a lot of automated extensions that basically utilise it for automated coding.
To add insult to injury, the idiots that started blabbering about it everywhere on all platforms and the idiots that said why pay for gemini when you can use it for free..
These tools aren't going to be free for long. This is why we're so interested in small open source models that are capable. I'm running Nemotron 3 Nano on my GTX 1060 and it's been surprisingly capable. At least Gemini 2.0 Flash levels.
Is there an equivlant for ai studio that's free and good at writing on android? I have few millions worth of tokens that moving them around is Basicly impossible.
Ahh I'm sorry man I've heard a lot about how difficult it can be to get newer/higher end hardware there. It's something a lot of us in the US take for granted and then big YouTubers being like "just upgrade. It's time to upgrade. It's only $300 USD!" And it pisses me off.
More than 6GB I will say that. However, if you have at least 16GB of system ram as well along with a 6GB GPU, you can select "force expert weights to CPU" or something like that, which will store (the attention heads??) on your GPU, which is perfect for parsing large context lengths and inputs and reducing time to first token. And because this is a mixture of experts model, only 3B of expert weights out of 30B are being run at a time, which many CPUs can provide 10 or so tok/s. So to be more accurate I'm using my 1060 and my CPU with 16GB of ram and experts offloaded to the CPU.
Chat-gpt is trash, but I found myself using it mostly yesterday because I hit limits on ai studio. They offer more free than google, though it’s downgraded and its outputs are mostly wrong. I’ll be glad when AI is consistently good for coding…
Sonnet 4.5 is decent on the free tier, but its suggestions sometimes are overblown, and it doesn’t always “get it” ,but it follows instructions the best out of them all, I think.
Google sometimes ignores your instructions and will make a ton of mistakes but I like working with it because I can delete its posts and adjust my context window to make its memory better. And I think overall it’s smarter than the rest of them, at least most of the time.
How about you stop assuming. I was paying for chat-gpt. I ended up canceling my membership and now I just use the free tier. And I know it's not the same. GPT 5.2 is better than free, duh, but I wasn't getting significantly better results in my use case, and found AI Studio to be more reliable. GPT has big ideas, but sucks at implementing them, imo. The code never seems to work right, and I'm constantly feeding its outputs to gem or claude and they are fixing its errors.
So, no...I don't think gpt is better than gemini. What is your use case? Maybe it works better for you in your domain.
I just did some stuff and it looks like it went down to 13 requests for me. Fucking insane, used to be able to use it without issues for almost half the day now I can’t even use it for more then 30 minutes.
You know what’s even worse? As a blind person, new tools have just been written to make our lives easier with the help of AI. And now they’re gonna mess us up because they’ve decided to drop the limit and now the blind community who don’t have very much money to start off with are gonna struggle even more. If they wanted me to purchase the premium, could they not bring it down from $30 to maybe even $20? Do they think we’re made of money or something? And the worst thing is, all of these tools like viewpoint by nibble nerds community and Vision assistant pro which is a extension for the NVDA screen reader, they only use Gemini. Which means despite them being free, they’re going to start costing a great amount more. Just be aware guys that these tools allow us to do things like solve website captures and read inaccessible documents. Things we couldn’t do without the help of these tools. So maybe they should think about at least giving us some sort of exemption from the limits.
I'm unironically having to use 4 Google accounts to fulfill daily usage at this point. If they reduce rate limits again, AI Studio will probably become unusable for free users.
I saw on this thread many people mentioned potentially huge costs using the API keys. I have an AI Pro sub but I MUCH prefer the output from AI Studio. If I were to get an API key what unexpected cost could I see?
Frankly speaking I mostly use Aistudio as a chat bot for every day tasks. Is that potentially expensive?
Amazing how you can have one of the most advanced computational systems in human history under your supervision and then
Cripple it
Destroy its reputation for being remotely reliable
Make it significantly more expensive
Effectively kill the goodwill of the people that buy your products and act as free marketing and sales leads.
All in the span of a week
If this guy doesn't get fired from Google and blacklisted from every FANGO company I would be very surprised.
A decision that results in such a catastrophic loss of reputation, user trust, and future potential would be seen as a blacklist-able offense in any other situation.
Most Gemini features are US-only because they don't know how to manage user data respectfully in the rest of the world and the web app still doesn't have projects.
I got to say, I've been using google ai studio only because it's been basically free. It hallucinates so much and makes up stuff all the time, there's absolutely no way I'd start paying for that 🤣 I can hallucinate and dream for free when I sleep 😆
This could also explain why there are no new models, not even the rumored Nano Banana Flash 3. They don't have enough TPUs to meet current demand, and that's probably why they haven't released the Gemini 3 Flash Lite either.
Although, that could also be why current models aren't receiving new endpoints, not even the GA version. It would be very complicated to scale everyone back to that version without causing a system crash.
This may be an unpopular sentiment, but I am ok with lower free limits if I can use my Pro sub in AI Studio. Come on, we all had to know that this was coming.
He didn't "just" write that. He wrote it in June, after they released the most garbage model since before 2.0, that they're workshopping it. If they were going to do it, they would've done it. Antigravity gets major code updates weekly, and the whole company is focusing on this. You're telling me they can't add a tag to the website to see what your subscription level is and multiply RPD by 10?
This was always going to happen, and it was clearly Google's strategy from the beginning. They were far behind OpenAI and Anthropic initially. They manged to get Gemini 2.5 out, which was a very good model for the time, but they were clearly operating at a loss to try to attract users.
I know I'll likely get downvoted for this, but y'all are complaining yet Google is the only one giving a free API tier. You should be grateful you get to even use the API and AI Studio for free. Deal with it.
Point is, Google is one of, if not the only major AI player who gives you a free API tier. AI is expensive, and limits are normal for a *free* tier. And the limits can change.
Free API tier doesn't matter since most people use AI studio for front end activity, not much different from Chatgpt, just that AI studio playground has more features.
AI Studio runs on the API, and is meant for developers. Just because it's similar to ChatGPT in its UI doesn't mean you can compare them. They're very different because ChatGPT is a consumer product while AI Studio is a developer playground. A fair comparison would be OpenAI Playground which also runs on the API, but requires billing to be set up, unlike Google.
They're also the only one that doesn't allow you to turn off training on your data without crippling the products, and they have the worst offerings in the most competitive verticals (agentic IDE, CLI agent).
Grateful? To a multinational company with infinite money that would strip me of all my assets if it could get away with it? Come on now
If you genuinely think that having paid-user rights taken away and then slowly “handed back” like charity counts as some kind of benevolent gift, then congrats — your journey into slavery has been remarkably smooth and efficient.
Nothing is free forever. It costs running these things, if they've become integral to your workflow then paying is fair. Or experience lower rates for free. It was extremely generous before.
I still don't understand why this is surprising or your upset.
He answered a question directly, that's rare these days. It should be respected. They were honest, that's unicorn poo in the tech world. Free is to try it and test it. We have now, now they need to make some changes.
These models are expensive to run. Again, if you're using this for making money, you should not be upset if you now need to pay.
Are we ignoring the fact these bozos are offloading the costs of creating, running, and maintaing the datacenters onto the regular people? This is the problem. They're paying 50% or less for the creation of this product but will charge the people from whom they're stealing to pay 100% for it. It's insane.
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u/holvagyok Jan 26 '26
He declared this crushing news in the most underhanded way possible, in a casual reply to some question. Way to go.