Google Cuts AI Ultra and Packs More Into Pro

Google now sells four paid AI plans in the U.S., from $4.99 Plus to $199.99 Ultra 20x. The Free versus Pro versus Ultra Gemini chart that froze in December 2025 no longer matches the storefront.

Pro is still $19.99, but it now ships 5 TB of storage, YouTube Premium Lite, and a Nest-camera plan. Ultra no longer opens at $249.99. It opens at $99.99 for 20 TB, then jumps to $199.99 for 30 TB and a 20x quota.

The December Comparison Table Is Already Wrong

At I/O on May 20, 2025, Google folded Google One AI Premium and Gemini Advanced into Google AI Pro at $19.99 and launched Google AI Ultra at $249.99. The expensive tier bundled 30 TB across Drive, Photos, and Gmail, YouTube Premium, Veo video tools, Deep Think, and early agent features. Comparison posts spent the rest of 2025 counting daily prompts, Deep Research reports, and image caps as if those meters were the product.

By May 2026 that meter was gone. Google moved the Gemini app to compute-based limits on May 17, 2026, then rebuilt the catalog at I/O 2026 on May 19. Shimrit Ben-Yair, VP of Google Photos, Google One and AI Subscriptions, used that keynote cycle to sell a $100 Ultra plan for developers, and the U.S. Google One page lists that SKU at $99.99. The old top tier fell $50, to $199.99, with the same 20x usage claim attached.

THE SUBSCRIPTION LADDER SINCE I/O 2025

1. May 20, 2025: Google AI Pro replaces Gemini Advanced at $19.99, and Google AI Ultra launches at $249.99 with 30 TB and YouTube Premium.
2. December 2025: Side-by-side charts still list daily Thinking prompts, Deep Research report caps, and a 2 TB Pro storage allotment.
3. May 17, 2026: Gemini Apps switch to compute-based limits that refill every 5 hours until a weekly cap.
4. May 19, 2026: I/O 2026 adds Ultra 5x at $99.99 with 20 TB, cuts Ultra 20x to $199.99, and puts YouTube Premium Lite on Pro.
5. July 7, 2026: Google begins removing the AI Ultra Access add-on from Workspace and G Suite Legacy flexible plans.
6. September 9, 2026: Vikas Kansal, Group Product Manager for AI Subscriptions, adds voice tools, Google Pics, Sheets canvas, and Spark connections for Pro and Ultra.

The December table was a prompt menu. The 2026 ladder is a Google One super-plan with a Gemini multiplier printed on the receipt.

What $19.99 Buys After Google Raised the Storage

Google AI Pro still costs $19.99 a month in the United States, and that price now includes 5 TB of storage, 4x standard Gemini usage, a 1 million token context window, YouTube Premium Lite, Google Home Premium, and Google Health Premium. The old 2 TB Pro allotment from 2025 is gone at this price, so the $20 bill is a household storage upgrade first and a chatbot upgrade second.

The U.S. Google AI plan prices on Google One make the shift plain. Storage-only plans stop at Basic for $1.99 (100 GB) and Standard for $2.99 (200 GB). From 400 GB up, every larger bucket is sold as an AI plan: Plus at $4.99, Pro at $19.99, Ultra 5x at $99.99, Ultra 20x at $199.99.

THE CURRENT U.S. GOOGLE AI LADDER

Pro also includes 1,000 Google Flow credits a month and $10 in monthly Google Cloud credits, plus Gemini inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Meet. Students in the U.S. still see a one-year Google AI Pro offer with that same 5 TB pool.

YouTube, Nest Cameras, and the Real Bill

Google priced the extras so that canceling Pro hurts people who never open Gemini. Ben-Yair’s I/O 2026 post said paid AI Pro subscribers in select countries get a YouTube Premium Lite individual plan at no extra charge, and it put that perk at $8.99 a month in value. Ultra already included a full YouTube Premium individual plan. Lite is fewer ads on most videos, plus background play and downloads. It is not the full music-and-video Premium SKU, and Google One says bundle savings are not shareable inside a family group.

Storage is shareable. A Pro plan can cover the subscriber plus up to five others, which is how a $19.99 bill turns into a six-person Drive and Photos pool with Gemini attached. That is the quiet math power users keep running: one Pro seat spread across a household beats five separate $20 chatbot plans, even before anyone generates a video.

THE $19.99 PRO BUNDLE

• 5 TB pool: Shared across Gmail, Drive, and Photos, with family sharing for up to five other people.
• YouTube Premium Lite: Google valued the individual Lite plan at $8.99 a month when it added the perk in May 2026.
• Home Premium Standard: Camera history and Gemini home features sit on the same bill, with Advanced available as a $9.99 add-on.
• Health Premium: The coach requires the Google Health app and a Pixel Watch or Fitbit, sold separately.
• 1 million tokens: Pro and both Ultra SKUs share that context window in Gemini Apps.
• 1,000 Flow credits: Monthly credits for Google’s filmmaking tool, before any pay-as-you-go top-up.

Home Premium is the lock for Nest households, including people already using Gemini for Home on Lenovo displays. Health Premium is the lock for anyone who followed the Fitbit app becoming Google Health. Drop Pro, and the camera history and the coach drop with the chatbot.

A Five-Hour Quota Replaced Daily Prompts

December charts talked as if Pro meant 100 Thinking prompts a day and Ultra meant 500. Google’s Gemini Apps help page no longer publishes those daily counts. It says usage is compute-based, and that a prompt’s weight depends on complexity, the model, the feature, and chat length. Media generation, Deep Research, the Pro model, extended thinking, and Deep Think all drain the bar faster than a short text question.

The limits refresh every 5 hours until you hit a weekly cap. Paid users get a higher ceiling than free users, and the published multipliers are ratios against a “standard” allowance Google does not put a number on. Plus is 2x standard, Pro is 4x standard, and Ultra is 5x or 20x Pro, depending on the SKU. Hit the cap on a big model, and Google says it will drop you onto a smaller, faster one so the chat does not die. Pro and Ultra subscribers can buy pay-as-you-go credits for Antigravity, Flow, and, Google says, the Gemini app.

That is why developer tools feel tight on Pro even when the family storage looks generous. Antigravity, Jules, Gemini CLI, and AI Studio each have their own rows on the Google One comparison grid, with “expanded,” “higher,” and “highest” labels instead of hard request counts. People who buy Pro for coding agents then meet a second meter, which is the opening Google left for the $99.99 Ultra SKU.

Google Cut the $249.99 Ultra Plan and Split It

Ultra 5x is the plan Google built for people who already live in Drive and still run out of Gemini. For $99.99 you get 20 TB, 5x Pro usage in the Gemini app and Antigravity, a full YouTube Premium individual plan, Home Premium Advanced, Deep Think, Gemini Spark in the U.S., 10,000 Flow credits, and $40 in monthly Cloud credits. Five times Pro’s $19.99 is $99.95, so the cash step and the quota step are meant to look identical.

Ultra 20x is the leftover $249.99 product at $199.99. It keeps 30 TB, 20x Pro usage, 25,000 Flow credits, $100 in monthly Cloud credits, and Project Genie, Google’s world-building experiment, which Ben-Yair limited to the $200 tier. Deep Think stays on Ultra. Spark does not. Eligible AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the U.S. both get Spark as of the September 2026 rollout, including Chrome errands and Photos jobs.

I’ve always dreamed of having a power agent to help me get the most out of my 143,206 photos and videos. And that day has come!

Shimrit Ben-Yair, VP of Google Photos, Google One and AI Subscriptions

The sample jobs she posted are household chores, not benchmark prompts: find vacation selfies, erase crowds, file an album, check a concert flyer against the calendar, send grandparents a Sunday recap. Ultra still buys headroom. It also buys an agent that treats a Photos library as a work queue, which is a different product than “more Gemini.”

Free Gemini and the New $4.99 Plus Rung

Free Gemini is not an empty app. Gemini Apps still give Flash-Lite, Flash, and Pro to accounts with no AI plan, and the free context window is 32k tokens. The ceiling is the standard compute budget, the 15 GB storage pool, and feature rows that Google marks limited. Deep Think, Spark, and the fat context window stay off this rung.

Plus is the rung the December 2025 charts did not have. In the U.S. it is $4.99 for 400 GB, 2x standard usage, and a 128k token window, with Daily Brief in the U.S. and a thinner slice of Flow credits (200 a month). It is the plan for people who outgrew 200 GB and do not want to pay $19.99 yet. It is also how Google stopped selling large storage as a plain Google One SKU.

FREE VS PLUS IN THE U.S.

• 15 GB: Free storage across Gmail, Drive, and Photos, with a 32k token Gemini window.
• $4.99 Plus: 400 GB, 2x standard Gemini usage, and a 128k token window.
• Flow crumbs: Free accounts get 100 Flow credits a month plus 50 a day; Plus gets 200 a month.
• No Lite: YouTube Premium Lite, Home Premium, and Health Premium start at Pro, not Plus.

A free account can still open Gemini 3 models. It cannot open the 1 million token window Pro uses for long files and codebases, and it cannot keep a 5 TB Photos library on the same login. That gap, not a missing model name, is what Plus and Pro actually sell.

Canceling Pro Now Costs Storage and Camera History

Workspace customers already got a forced version of this choice. Google is simplifying Workspace AI add-ons and removing the AI Ultra Access add-on, with flexible Business, Enterprise, and G Suite Legacy plans moving to AI Expanded Access on July 7, 2026. Education and personal @gmail.com Workspace purchases lose the add-on on that date or at the next renewal. Google’s own table points Education buyers at Google AI Pro for Education and personal-account buyers at Google AI Ultra.

On the consumer side, the September 9, 2026 note from Kansal is the latest reminder that Pro keeps picking up chores. Eligible plans get voice in Gmail, Docs, and Keep, Google Pics in Workspace for Pro and Ultra, Sheets canvas mini-apps, and Spark hooked to Chrome and Photos in the U.S. Google’s own product account posted the Pics rollout the same day.

Google Pics — our image creation and editing tool in @GoogleWorkspace — is rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers and most Workspace business customers.

Built on our Nano Banana image generation and editing model, Pics gives you the control you need to create… pic.twitter.com/t0jQZYQ6nB

— Google (@Google) September 9, 2026

Pics is built on Nano Banana and sits inside documents, which is the same trick as Home Premium and Health Premium: the AI plan becomes the only way to keep a Google perk you already use. Eligible college students can still take a year of AI Pro with 5 TB attached. Everyone else is choosing a storage bucket, a YouTube SKU, a camera history window, and a 5-hour quota bar, then calling it Gemini.