So, no, it is not astroturfing.
Gemini AI Plus does exist:
Option 2: A person is unfamiliar with one of Google's plans.
Which one seems more likely to you?
Yeah, the newer models are not included in your $5 subscription. You can always pay for a higher tier plan if you want access. What is so shocking about that?
I completely get not offering frontier models in the lowest subscription, but not having even a small quota of their most recent flash models is just shitty. I used to be on their Pro plan, and decided to downgrade based on how little I was using it. But now? I don't use it at all, because I have moved on to PAYG open-weight models.
Google does tend to have terrible messaging/branding/etc that results in part of these problems.
When Argon first came out, it wasn't included in Antigravity/agy and I personally never saw a Google stated plan on when they would include it, and because they removed Gemini Pro when Argon was released there was a brief window where Antigravity/agy didn't support a "Pro" model at all even for people with a "Pro" subscription.
That said, I'm with you on the idea that Google is roughly on par with everyone else despite the rhetoric here on HN that makes it look like they are way behind. They do have typical Google problems with messaging/branding for their AI products, just like all their other products, but when I use Google models for personal use I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything I get when using Anthropic for work stuff.
And for context I say this all as someone who is a bit of a Google hater these days (not happy with some recent Android decisions, moved off of gmail to avoid too much Google power concentration, etc).
"How do I even pay for it?" is particularly baffling to me considering it's literally just included in their normal range of Google One subscriptions that bundle Drive/etc which have been around for years.
You pick a plan and pay for it, and sign in to whichever app you're using like Gemini chat (ChatGPT/Claude Chat) or Antigravity (Codex/Claude Code).
AI Studio is the developer console (OpenAI Platform/Claude Platform). Vertex AI is the Google Cloud enterprise platform (using GPT or Claude models via AWS Bedrock/Azure AI Foundry).
Pretty much every product is a 1:1 equivalent with the same offering from OpenAI/Anthropic + Azure/AWS. Google is both a hyperscaler and an AI lab, so the venn diagram includes both the direct OpenAI/Anthropic products and what they also serve for enterprises via Azure/AWS.
I get that Google does bad stuff and isn't popular on HN which is understandable, but the specific criticisms really don't make sense. The entire AI developer/consumer space is messy and confusing but that's an industry wide complaint not specific to Google unless they should just not compete on certain verticals.
I can’t purchase any Google consumer products now, because this “family” account is now an “enterprise” and… there’s just no way. It can’t be done. No. Just… go away. Shoo…
I can’t get a YouTube “family” account.
I can’t get an Antigravity personal account.
Nothing works.
Google insists that I upgrade the be the entire organisation, or nothing.
It’s doubly stupid because like millions of people, I initial subscribed as a non-business and was forced to convert by Google!
With Microsoft, an org can mix and match E3, E5, or E7 licensing tiers on a per-user basis. Which makes sense, because not every employee is "the same"! This is just obvious if you stop and think about for more than a fraction of a second. As a random example, I work with an org in "transport". Their backoffice staff have a bunch of advanced cloud app licenses, their bus drivers do not, because their job isn't sitting in front of a PC all day!
Google. Just. Doesn't. Get. This.
It's all-or-nothing.
Upgrade the entire org, or nobody gets AI.
And to be honest, I understand the reasoning, Google Workspace is supposed to be simpler to operate in comparison to Microsoft 365, and simple means a single licencing choice.
If you're at the scale where you need to worry about mixing and matching licences, you're at the scale where you should be looking at either an enterprise contract or going through a partner, otherwise you're going to be paying list price.
It sucks for people who can handle the complexity, but also as someone who has spent far too time in Microsoft licencing conversations and contract talks, Microsoft licencing is painfully complex (some licencing is across the whole tenant, some spend is consumption based billing against Azure, some licencing is requires a minimum amount against a %age of your total M365 user base, and then don't get me started on licencing machine users or multiplexing).
Partners or resellers have no reason to exist as a part of this trivial database design concern.
It’s a category error of the highest order to assume that only “largest enterprises” want or need per-user product licensing control. If anything, it’s the smallest orgs that need to be frugal at this level of granularity.
The relatively high cost of AI subscriptions just makes this error much more obvious, impossible to ignore or pretend is “actually better somehow”.
Because, you know, everyone would rather pay $200/mo so that even their gardener and the bus driver has an “Ultra” AI subscription than spend even ten minutes in a web portal assigning that license only to the sole developer on the payroll!
For example: what is "Antigravity Entitlement"? You can buy whatever subscription (even Ultra or higher) you like and not have access to Antigravity at all. You will have to then go through some nebulous verification process which half the time is just broken. E.g. people in EU were for months blocked from verification by the Google app insisting they message a RCE number in US unreachable from EU carriers.
Then you have to consider what is the potential fallout of Google deciding you did some hacking or said to AI something politically incorrect and banning your entire account and all connected accounts.
If you have anything important on Google you need to first degoogle before considering using their AI services or you're playing with fire.
Maybe it's a b2b vs b2c thing.
So, not that easy for me (I should note im not in the USA)
Have you tried contacting payments or the related product support to ask? https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/?hl=en#topic=90175...
We do a lot to make sure credit cards work all around the world (like we kept supporting cards in India when Apple pulled out due to certain regulations). There could be some issue with your account or card. I could maybe look if you contacted me, but likely I couldn't reply at all.
Sorry to be so whiney, and I'm sure your powers over this are very limited, but google payment messes are widely known and documented and rampant, and apparently with no improvement in sight. Google is really leaving money on the table for not being more proactive with fixing these.
And investigating a single issue can sometimes find a corner case we've missed, which is why we regularly do it.
3.8 flash and argon have been great FYI. Can't tell a difference between any of the claude models I use at work, minus actually being able to read what it writes.