Is Gemini Free? Yes. Google Rations the Model, Not the Features

Yes. Gemini is free with any Google account, and signing up doesn't involve a card. You can even type into gemini.google.com without signing in.

Google gives the free plan nearly everything. Its own feature table ticks Deep Research, Canvas, Connected Apps, image and music generation, audio overviews and slide generation for accounts with no plan at all. Of the features it lists, the ones that need a subscription are video, the daily brief, scheduled actions, Tasks and the Nano Banana Pro redo.

What Google rations is harder to see. Since 9 October, a free account doesn't choose its model. Most answers come from Flash-Lite, Google's fastest and smallest, reading a window of 32,000 tokens. And the features that make Gemini useful for work, reading your Gmail, Docs and Drive, only run while your chats can be used for training and read by human reviewers.

For this post I read Google's plan page, eleven Gemini help articles, the Gemini Apps Privacy Hub, the API's pricing page and terms, and the release notes, all on 20 October 2026, and opened Gemini signed out to see its model picker.

The Short Answer

Question	Answer
Is Gemini free?	Yes. $0 with a Google account, no card, on the web, on phones and in the Mac and Windows apps
Which model is free?	Auto. Google routes most prompts to Flash-Lite. Picking Flash, Pro or Argon yourself needs a plan
Is it unlimited?	No. A compute-based allowance refreshes every five hours, up to a weekly limit
How much can it read at once?	32K tokens. AI Plus gets 128K, AI Pro 1 million
Are there ads?	Google says your Gemini chats aren't used to show you ads
Are my chats used for training?	By default, yes, with human review. Switching it off also cuts Gemini off from Gmail, Docs and Drive
What does AI Plus add for $4.99?	The Flash model, a model picker, twice the usage, video, the daily brief and Gemini in Gmail
What does AI Pro add for $19.99?	Pro and Gemini 4 Argon, four times the usage, a 1 million token window and Gemini in Docs
Is there a free AI Pro?	For eligible US college students, for one year, if claimed by 31 December 2026

What Gemini's Free Plan Includes in 2026

Google's plan card for Free says "Get everyday help from Google AI to tackle tasks at work, school or home." It lists the Flash-Lite model, image generation and editing, Deep Research, Gemini Live, Canvas, Gems, limited access to Google Flow, Gemini Notebook and 15 GB of storage. The feature table in Google's limits article adds more. Here is what an account with no plan gets.

• Deep Research. Ticked for free accounts, with two conditions. Google rates it "High" for usage, so each report draws far more of your allowance than a question does. And it says features like Deep Research "may be unavailable during periods of high demand" for users without a plan.
• Connected Apps. The Google Workspace app lets Gemini search Gmail, Docs and Drive, manage Calendar events, and add to Tasks and Keep. Since 13 October, a new Customise menu also connects "more than 40 apps or services", including Instacart, OpenTable and Adobe, on every tier. Most of those work in English in the US for now. The Workspace connection needs one setting switched on, and that setting is the subject of a section below.
• Canvas, Skills and Gems. Skills are saved instructions Gemini runs whenever a prompt matches. They arrived on 30 September for users aged 18 and over, and Google says they "will soon replace Gems".
• Images and music. Image generation with Nano Banana 2 and music generation are both ticked. Free downloads are 1K resolution, against 2K on a plan. The free plan card also gives "limited access to Nano Banana Pro" in Google Flow, Google's video-making tool, though the Gemini app itself keeps Nano Banana Pro for paid plans.
• Study and presentation tools. Quizzes and flashcards, audio overviews, Storybook and slide generation are all ticked, along with screen automation for Android apps.
• Gemini Live, the voice mode, is on the plan card.
• Files. Up to 10 files in one prompt, 100 MB each, or 2 GB for a video. Free accounts get 5 minutes of video and 10 minutes of audio in total, and there's a separate rolling limit on "chats with files".
• Gemini Notebook, the research tool that was called NotebookLM until July. The free plan allows 50 sources per notebook.
• Desktop apps. Google released the Mac app in April "free of charge" and a Windows app in September.

Five features in the table need a plan: video generation, the daily brief, scheduled actions, Tasks in Gemini and the Nano Banana Pro redo. Gemini Spark, Google's agent, needs a paid plan too, and Gemini inside Google Docs starts at AI Pro.

The missing features have something in common. Google says video "generally requires the most usage" of anything Gemini does, and the daily brief, scheduled actions and Tasks all work on their own while you do something else. Almost everything you start yourself, in a chat, is ticked. Google's limits on the free plan sit somewhere else.

You Don't Choose the Model

Google's change notice for free accounts took effect on 9 October. Accounts without a plan now default to a setting called Auto, which Google explains like this: "Most prompts will go to Flash-Lite, our fastest model. Prompts that need deeper reasoning may go to Flash or Pro." Turn smart model selection off and "chats for users without an AI plan will use Flash-Lite for all responses."

There's no third option. Google's models article says that "if you have a Google AI plan you can manually switch models." Without one, Auto decides. When I opened gemini.google.com signed out, the picker listed four models, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.6 Flash, 3.1 Pro and 4 Argon, with only Flash-Lite selectable and a line inviting me to sign in.

Google describes Flash-Lite as "a fast, cost-efficient model built for quick answers to everyday questions and lightweight tasks," and that's a fair description. On Artificial Analysis's intelligence index, which I read on 20 October, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite scores 22. Gemini 3.6 Flash at high reasoning scores 34, 3.8 Flash 41 and Gemini 4 Argon 53. Those scores come from fixed reasoning settings, and Auto hands some harder prompts to a bigger model, so free Gemini will sometimes beat 22. Google doesn't say how often.

You can check which model answered. Open the response's More menu, choose Show thinking steps and scroll to the bottom. You can also raise the thinking level to Medium or High, which free accounts are allowed to do. It starts at Low if you don't choose, and higher levels use more of your allowance. How the picker got here, through Fast, Thinking and Pro, is in Gemini Thinking vs Pro.

The model choice reaches images too. Google's image article says Nano Banana 2 Lite is used "when the Gemini model is set to Flash-Lite," the model most free prompts go to. Nano Banana's price and limits has the rest of Google's image ladder.

A Window of 32,000 Tokens

The context window is how much Gemini can read at once: your files, your prompt and the chat so far. Google's limits article gives free accounts 32K tokens, AI Plus 128K and AI Pro and Ultra 1 million.

Google says a 1 million token window holds "up to 1,500 pages of text." By that ratio, the free window holds about 48 pages and AI Plus about 190. That's my arithmetic, not Google's figure, and it's the most you could fit with nothing else in the chat. Google's own example of a large-file prompt, in the same article, is "Analyze this 100-page PDF financial report." That's about twice what the free window holds.

Gemini doesn't refuse a file that's too big. Its upload article warns that you may get "a response that misses connections or details throughout the content." For a long contract or a year of bank statements, the free plan can give you an answer about a document it has only partly read.

ChatGPT's free plan sits in the same range, at 27K tokens. Free plans give you room for a long email thread, not a long report.

Is Gemini Free Unlimited?

No. On 17 May 2026 Google stopped publishing per-feature counts and moved Gemini to compute-based limits. Your usage depends on how complex the prompt is, which features you use and how long the chat has run. The allowance refreshes every five hours until you reach a weekly limit.

Google gives no number for the free plan. It calls it "standard limits" and sizes the paid plans against it. AI Plus gets twice as much, AI Pro four times, and Ultra five or twenty times AI Pro's, depending on the tier. Its limits article ranks what costs the most:

What you ask for	Google's relative usage cost
A short question, no follow-ups	Very low
A long, ongoing conversation	Medium
A large file or spreadsheet	Medium
Deep Research	High
Images, music or video	High

Long chats cost more because Gemini re-reads the whole conversation before every answer. Google's own tip is to start a new chat when you change topic.

Gemini warns you when you're close to the limit and tells you when it refreshes. You can check your usage at gemini.google.com under Settings, then Usage limits. A paid subscriber who runs out "can continue your conversation with Flash-Lite." A free account waits.

Free accounts are also first in line when capacity is short. Google's article says limits for users without a plan "may be limited before users with a plan," and that compute-heavy features like Deep Research may switch off for them at busy times. And there's no way to buy more on the free plan. Google sells AI credits, but its help page says they're "only available for Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra plans."

What You Pay Instead: Your Chats

No Ads, So Far

Free ChatGPT now shows ads in the US and a growing list of other countries, which I went through in Is ChatGPT free?. Google's Privacy Hub has one line on the question: "Your Gemini Apps chats are not being used to show you ads. If this changes, we will clearly communicate it to you." That's a statement about today, with a promise of notice rather than a promise of no change.

Training and Human Review, On by Default

Gemini keeps your chats under a setting called Keep Activity. Google's help article on it says: "If you're 18 or over, Keep Activity is on by default."

With it on, Google says it uses your activity "to provide, develop, and improve its services (including training generative AI models)," with help from human reviewers, including reviewers from outside companies Google hires. Google says it disconnects chats from your account before they go to those outside reviewers. Reviewed chats are kept for up to three years, and deleting your Gemini activity doesn't delete them, because they're no longer linked to your account. Everything else auto-deletes after 18 months by default, which you can change to 3 months, 36 months or never.

Google's own advice is plain: "Please don't enter confidential information that you wouldn't want a reviewer to see or Google to use to improve our services."

None of this is specific to the free plan. The Privacy Hub covers every personal Google account, so a $19.99 AI Pro subscriber starts with the same default.

Switching It Off Costs You the Connections

You can turn Keep Activity off in Gemini Apps Activity. From then on Google keeps each new chat for 72 hours, to answer you and to check for abuse, and doesn't use it for training unless you send feedback.

Here is the trade. Google's article on the Workspace app lists Keep Activity as a requirement: "Gemini can't connect to Google Workspace when this setting is off." Without it, Gemini can't search your Gmail or Drive, and you can't add a file from Drive to a chat. Notebooks lose their memory of past chats, can't take Drive files as sources, and study and business notebooks stop working.

On a personal Google account, then, you choose. Either Gemini reads your inbox, or your chats stay out of training. You can't have both.

Two smaller points. Feedback overrides the switch. If Keep Activity is off and you rate a response, Google collects "the last 24 hours of your chats" with it, including uploads and data from Connected Apps, and keeps that for up to three years. And a Temporary Chat is never used to train Google's models, though it's kept for 72 hours like any other.

Is Gemini No Longer Free?

It's still free. Three changes this year are behind the feeling that it isn't. On 17 May Google replaced its published counts with a compute-based allowance. On 9 October free accounts lost the model picker. And Gems, Gemini's custom assistants, are on their way out in favour of Skills.

New paid features have also landed above the free plan. Gemini 4 Argon arrived on 13 October for AI Pro and Ultra only, and whether Argon is worth $19.99 is its own question. Gemini Spark and video with Gemini Omni need a subscription too.

Some of this year's changes added to the free plan. The Mac app came in April, free of charge, and the Windows app in September. Skills reached every user aged 18 and over in September, and the 40-plus connected apps arrived for every tier in October.

Free Gemini vs AI Plus vs AI Pro

	Free	AI Plus	AI Pro
Price (US)	$0	$4.99 a month	$19.99 a month
Chat models	Auto, mostly Flash-Lite	Flash-Lite and Flash, Pro until Google's change reaches you	Flash-Lite, Flash, Pro and Gemini 4 Argon
Pick the model yourself	No	Yes	Yes
Usage	Standard limits	2x	4x
Context window	32K tokens	128K	1 million
Video generation	No	Yes	Yes
Daily brief, scheduled actions	No	Yes	Yes
Tasks in Gemini	No	No	Yes
Nano Banana Pro redo	No	Yes	Yes
Audio and video uploads	10 min audio, 5 min video	10 min audio, 5 min video	3 hours audio, 1 hour video
Gemini in Gmail	Three features, US only	Yes	Yes
Gemini in Docs	No	No	Yes
Extra AI credits	No	No	Yes
Storage	15 GB	400 GB	5 TB
Training on your chats	On by default, opt-out	On by default, opt-out	On by default, opt-out

Sources are Google's US plan page, its limits, models, upload and image help articles, and Google One's AI credits page, read on 20 October. Google's pages disagree on AI Plus and the Pro model. The models article lists Pro for Plus, the change notice shows Pro leaving Plus on a date Google emails you, and the plan card mentions only Flash. The three Gmail features free personal accounts get in the US are Help me write, AI Overviews for email threads and Suggested Replies.

Read across the rows and each step buys something different. AI Plus at $4.99 buys the choice of model, plus video and the features that run on a schedule. AI Pro at $19.99 buys the big window, Argon and Gemini inside Docs. The privacy row doesn't change at any price. How Gemini in Docs compares with a free add-on for the same apps is in Grok vs Gemini, and the head-to-head with OpenAI's ladder is in Gemini vs ChatGPT.

Can You Get Gemini AI Pro for Free?

Students can. Google offers eligible US college students aged 18 and over a free year of Google AI Pro, including students whose 2025 trial has run out. You have to claim it by 31 December 2026, add a payment method, and verify your student status again each year. After the year it renews at $19.99 a month unless you cancel.

Outside the US the offer can be smaller. Depending on your country, Google's student page can offer a free year of Google AI Plus instead, renewing at $4.99 a month. Check your own country's page before you plan around AI Pro. Every AI student discount compares Google's offer with OpenAI's, Anthropic's and Perplexity's.

Is Gemini Free for Business Use?

Three questions come up when the account is for work.

Who owns what Gemini writes? You do, as far as Google is concerned. Its terms of service say that "some of our services allow you to generate original content. Google won't claim ownership over that content." I didn't find a clause that keeps free accounts to personal use.

Where do client documents end up? The Keep Activity default applies, so on a personal account a client's documents can end up in front of a reviewer. There are three ways around it. You can turn Keep Activity off and give up the Gmail and Drive connections. You can use a Temporary Chat for anything sensitive. Or you can use Gemini Notebook. Google says that "when you use Gemini Notebook as an individual, your data is not used for training unless you share feedback," and its Privacy Hub says files added to a notebook as sources "are not used directly for training." Chats with a notebook inside the Gemini app still follow your Keep Activity setting, so for a folder of client files, the separate Notebook app at notebook.google is the safer place.

What if your email already runs on Google Workspace? Then you may already have Gemini under business terms. Google's Workspace privacy page says access to the Gemini app is "turned on by default" as a core service, and that your content "is not human reviewed or otherwise used for Generative AI model training outside your domain without permission." Which models you get depends on your Workspace plan, and an admin can switch the app off.

Is Gemini Free Without an Account, on Phones and on Desktop?

Signed out, Google's sign-in article says "you can use some features in the Gemini web app." In my test the picker allowed only 3.5 Flash-Lite, and a banner explained what was missing: "Sign in to connect to Google apps, create images, and more." Nothing is saved to an account. Google's Privacy Hub says signed-out use is handled under its general privacy policy and "not associated with your Google account."

Signed in, a free account is the same on the web, the Android and iPhone apps, and the desktop apps. The Mac app needs macOS 15 or later and the Windows app Windows 10 or later.

The Other Free Gemini: Google AI Studio and the API

Developers get a different free deal. Google's API pricing page lists a free tier with "Free input & output tokens" on its Flash and Flash-Lite models, including Gemini 3.8 Flash, which the same page calls Google's "most intelligent Flash model." Google AI Studio, the browser tool for trying them, is "free of charge in all available regions." Pro and Gemini 4 Argon aren't on the free tier, and neither is image generation.

The price is your data, more explicitly than in the app. The API terms say that on free services Google uses what you submit "to provide, improve, and develop Google products," and that "human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output." The exception is the EEA, Switzerland and the UK, where free use gets the paid tier's data terms. On the paid tier, the pricing page answers "No" to whether your content is used to improve Google's products.

When Paying for Gemini Makes Sense

Flash-Lite isn't enough and you want to choose. AI Plus at $4.99 is the cheapest way to pick Flash yourself, and it doubles the allowance.

Your documents run past 48 pages. AI Plus reads about 190 pages at once. AI Pro's 1 million tokens holds a whole report or contract.

You record calls or meetings. Free and AI Plus accept 10 minutes of audio. AI Pro takes three hours.

You want Gemini inside Docs and Sheets. That starts at AI Pro, or a Workspace plan that includes it.

You want video, a daily brief or scheduled actions. All three start at AI Plus.

Clients send you their files. Paying for a personal plan leaves the training default where it is. A Workspace business account changes it.

You ask Gemini a few things a week. The free plan is enough. Google built Flash-Lite for everyday questions and rates a short question as "very low" usage.

You'd like Claude or ChatGPT in the mix. None of Google's plans include another lab's models, which is where the next section comes in.

Where izzedo Fits

izzedo chat's free plan includes Gemini 3.8 Flash, the model Google's API page calls its most intelligent Flash, and Nano Banana 2 for images. You pick Gemini yourself, from the same menu as Claude Haiku 5.5, GPT-6 Luna, Grok 4.7, DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen. In the thread below, Gemini 3.8 Flash wrote a text message for a two-groomer dog salon announcing a $15 fee for missed appointments. Then Claude Haiku 5.5 read it as a regular client who has never missed one.

Haiku's objection is fair. "Leave big gaps in our day" does make a client who always turns up feel lumped in with the ones who don't. Its fix goes too far the other way, though. The honest reason for a no-show fee is the empty slot, and Haiku replaced it with "to keep our two groomers fully focused on each dog," which sounds kinder and explains less. I'd keep Gemini's reason and take Haiku's warmer closing line. A second model hands you a second draft, and you still choose.

The free plan also has agent mode and 50+ connectors, including Gmail, Google Drive and Notion, and izzedo's default is to ask you before each tool call. Connecting your inbox isn't tied to a training switch here, because none of the AI providers behind izzedo train on your chats or use them for their own products. Several hold requests for a set period to check for abuse and then delete them. Google's period is 55 days.

Gemini 3.1 Pro and Gemini 4 Argon come with the $6 Hobby plan, along with every other chat model izzedo has. In the Gemini app, Argon needs AI Pro at $19.99 a month. izzedo's allowance is shared across all models, and Argon draws on it several times faster than an everyday model, so Hobby is where you send Argon your hardest questions, not every question. Current allowances are on the pricing page.

The Bottom Line

Gemini is free, and the free plan includes almost everything Google builds into Gemini, apart from video and the features that work while you're away.

What you give up is less visible. Since 9 October, Google picks your model, and most of the time it picks Flash-Lite. You get a window of about 48 pages. And unless you switch Keep Activity off, losing Gmail and Drive with it, your chats can train Google's models, and any a reviewer reads are kept for up to three years.

So use the free plan for everyday questions and research, and decide which side of the Keep Activity switch you're on before the first client document goes in. Google updated its Privacy Hub the day before I read it and rewrote its limits article this month, so whatever you read about Gemini's plans, this post included, check the date and then Google's own pages.

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Want Gemini 3.8 Flash on a free plan, with Claude and ChatGPT in the same thread? Try izzedo chat free, no credit card required.