Google makes $19.99 a month the entry price for Gemini Pro

Take someone on a free Gemini account who opens the app on October 9 to rerun a prompt that worked on Pro the week before. According to an updated Google support document reported by 9to5Google, that account now gets 3.5 Flash-Lite and no other model ^[2]. The prompt still runs, on a model it was never tested against.

Teams tell themselves a free or cheap seat is simply Gemini, with the model as a setting someone changes when the work gets hard. The support document describes something narrower. The free seat becomes one model, and the $4.99 AI Plus seat becomes two, Flash-Lite and Flash ^[7][9]. For anyone who needs 3.1 Pro, the cheapest plan is now AI Pro at $19.99 a month ^[4].

Google is pitching Deep Think, its option for "maximum parallel reasoning," arriving on AI Pro ^[4]. Until now it sat only on the $99.99 and $199.99 plans ^[10], so its entry price falls to about a fifth of what it was ^[14]. For the two lower tiers, the change only takes things away ^[2][7]. The two copies of the 9to5 report also disagree on timing. One says AI Pro customers "will get access" to Deep Think, the other says they are "now getting access" ^[5][4].

On AI Pro, a person who sets high effort on routine questions spends more of the compute-based limit ^[1][6]. Today the app offers a single "Extended thinking: Complex problem solving" toggle ^[8]. The report does not say how Deep Think counts against the limit.

I'd move people up only where their actual work in the past month used Pro, and leave everyone else where they are. The cost of that choice is a person who needed Pro once a month and now has to ask for it. Count the tasks that needed Pro. App opens are not evidence for a $19.99 seat.

Then sort each seat on two facts, its current tier and whether its user ran Pro for real work:

- Free, no Pro use: stays free if Flash-Lite is enough, or moves to AI Plus at $4.99 a month to get Flash back ^[7][9]. - Free, Pro use: AI Pro at $19.99 a month ^[4]. - AI Plus, no Pro use: no change ^[7]. - AI Plus, Pro use: $15 a month more per person ^[12].