Following the release of the updated Google Gemini yesterday (for me at least), the search giant started enforcing much stricter usage limits. I’ve been using Gemini ever since it was called Bard and have never bumped into rate limits. While I haven’t hit the new cap yet either, as it refreshes every five hours, I do worry a bit that I could feasibly hit the weekly rate limit, as it doesn’t appear to be that generous for us free-tier users.
I could sense that Google would soon be bringing in such limits because I’ve been messing around with vibe coding tools like Google’s Antigravity and Windsurf for little side projects. Until a little while ago, Windsurf was extremely generous, but that all changed when it decided to limit free usage of its SWE LLM. The standard SWE-1.6 is now behind a paywall, and the free SWE-1.6-Slow is painfully slow.
While free users can still get by installing several AI apps and just rotating between them when allowances run out, this change to aggressively squeeze money out of users is a bit of a shock to the system, given the fact that these tools have had large free usage allowances since ChatGPT launched in 2022. It was all a ploy by Big Tech and AI startups to get you hooked on their tools (which we didn’t know we needed), so later they could drop the free allowances and push customers to pay for the services.
