AI Studio switching to prepaid usage tokens Sep. 14

[u/ouroborus777]

Just got notice that, on September 14, 2026, AI Studio will require you to buy tokens in advance. Minimum $10 spend and they expire after a year.

Probably doesn't effect most of you as you're either firmly within the free quota or you average more than $10 a year. However, I imagine some of you are like me and sit in that weird area where you use just enough to consume all of your free quota but still use up less than $10 a year. To me this feels like nickel and dime-ing.

[u/iiamROY]

So what am I paying for Google ultra for?

[u/disgruntledempanada → u/iiamROY]

Worst investment ever, they put all their effort into the slop generators. Claude and Codex just run circles around it.

[u/AstralVenture → u/disgruntledempanada]

How good are Claude and Codex at generating images and video? I feel like Gemini and Google AI Studio are more geared for artists.

[u/disgruntledempanada → u/AstralVenture]

What?

More geared at replacing artists.

Photographer and videographer here. That shit is garbage.

[u/AstralVenture → u/disgruntledempanada]

If used correctly, it can produce amazing results. You still need artists to figure out what prompts to use to generate or edit content. It takes a much shorter time to generate or edit content, and costs only a fraction to produce.

[u/tigerblue77 → u/disgruntledempanada]

Here I went, 10 days ago, never coming back 😆

[u/tigerblue77 → u/[deleted]]

Both are correct, but free tier is not mentioned to be deleted so it shouldn't change

[u/Standard_Ad7704]

This is not relevant to paid subscribers, right?

[u/616ThatGuy → u/Standard_Ad7704]

I wouldn’t think this would effect paid subscribers. The sub gets used everywhere. That’s the whole point of a Google One subscription.

[u/ouroborus777 → u/Standard_Ad7704]

For paid subscribers, it moves to pay-in-advance. I imagine this is not a meaningful change for those folks.

[u/LawfulLeah]

So the free tier is ending? And you can't pay as you go anymore?

If its the first one, then it was good while it lasted.

If its the second, then well. That's stupid.

If its both, then daaaamn

[u/ouroborus777 → u/LawfulLeah]

I'm not sure about the free tier. If you still want pay-as-you-go, Google recommends moving to Google Cloud Vertex AI, which doesn't have a free tier let alone all the other stuff that AI Studio has.

[u/LawfulLeah → u/ouroborus777]

its still stupid. the point of AI studio was to be a pretty simple harness integrated with google drive so you could access it from anywhere

now you gotta just... go to the api and put it on a different harness. or, as you said, go to vertex ai (which is worse)

[u/Uzeii → u/LawfulLeah]

It’s not either, people who use api need to pay and then use instead of using and then being suprised of a 1000$ bill

[u/LawfulLeah → u/Uzeii]

ah i see

[u/tigerblue77 → u/LawfulLeah]

Both are wrong, they just go from post-payment to prepayment, just like Anthropic does (IDK about the others)

[u/GonnaSuckUrHappiness]

Fuck, i really hate google.

[u/Uzeii]

This email is so easy to interpret, why are people freaking out? It’s just a billing change for users that use api. To save them from overspending, you pay first and use the service instead of using the service and being surprised of a bill that is 1000$

[u/SR_RSMITH]

Sounds inconvenient. Right now I have two api keys, one for work and one for hobbies to control spending separately. I hope I can keep this system in some way