What you need to know
- Google just overhauled its AI subscriptions with a new $100/month Ultra tier, cheaper flagship pricing, and a completely new way to manage AI usage.
- The new AI Ultra $100 plan targets power users with 5x higher usage limits, Gemini 3.5 Flash access, Google Antigravity support, 20TB of storage, and bundled YouTube Premium.
- Gemini Spark is Google’s new always-on AI agent that can move across Google services, connect information, and act on your behalf like a digital operator.
Google is changing how you pay for and interact with its AI ecosystem. Fresh out of I/O 2026, the company announced a massive shakeup to its Google AI subscriptions, including a new tier, a price cut to its most expensive plan, and a change to how prompt limits are handled.
The big news is a new $100/month AI Ultra plan aimed squarely at power users, developers, technical leads, and advanced creators. It has a 5x higher usage limit than the Pro plan and can be used in the Gemini app and Google Antigravity, the company’s new agent-first development platform.
It also includes a whopping 20TB of cloud storage and an ad-free YouTube Premium individual plan so you can listen to music or stream tutorials while you code. Also buried deep within this tier is the lightning-fast testing and debugging of Gemini 3.5 Flash.
At the same time, Google is slashing the price on its flagship AI Ultra plan from $250 to $200. You still get the exact same capabilities, including a massive 20x usage limit over the Pro tier in the Gemini app and Google Antigravity, just for less cash.
Meet your new AI agents
If you’re on the $100 or $200 Ultra plan in the U.S., you can access Gemini Spark. It is an AI agent that works 24/7, moving across your digital life, connecting the dots across Google products, and acting on your behalf. It lands on Beta for Ultra subscribers next week.
Meanwhile, $200 Ultra subscribers globally (who are 18 or older) are getting access to Project Genie. This experimental tool allows you to create and explore new worlds, and a new update powered by Street View makes those creations grounded in reality.
All paid tiers — Plus, Pro, and Ultra — are being updated to the latest models globally, including Gemini Omni and Gemini 3.5 Flash. Gemini Omni, which was also unveiled at Google I/O, lets you create and edit content from any combination of text, image, and video inputs. You can drop a video from your camera roll, apply templates, and edit without needing technical skills.
Productivity tools are getting a huge bump too. The new AI Inbox in Gmail (available for US Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers) intelligently triages your emails, drafts personalized replies, and pulls relevant Docs, Sheets, and Slides links. You also get the Daily Brief in the Gemini app, a morning digest that pulls from your Gmail, Calendar, and chats to flag priorities and suggest immediate next steps. Coming this summer for Pro and Ultra users: additional voice capabilities in Gmail, Docs, and Keep, plus an all-new image creation and editing tool called Google Pics.
And, of course, YouTube Premium is part of Ultra, but paid Pro subscribers in some countries will also soon get YouTube Premium Lite (valued at $8.99 monthly) included at no additional cost. The Pro and Ultra plans also include Health Premium and Home Premium for free.
Interestingly, Google is abandoning daily prompt limits and switching to a “compute-used” model. Your usage limit now also takes into account the complexity of your prompt, the features you’re using, and the length of your chat.
A simple text question costs far less of your allowance than a heavy video or coding request. Your limit resets every five hours until you hit your weekly limit. If you hit your limit on the biggest models, Google won’t leave you in the lurch. It’ll bump you down to smaller, faster models so you never miss a beat. Need the heavy lifters? Pro and Ultra subscribers can buy pay-as-you-go top-up AI credits.
Android Central’s Take
In essence, switching to a “compute-used” model is Google’s clever way of saying it’s applying surge pricing to your brainpower. Basically, we are paying $100-200 a month to beta test something that will inevitably throttle our workflows halfway through the day and require us to buy “pay-as-you-go” credits just to finish a project.
