With the launch of the Pixel 9, Google offered fairly extensive 12-month free trials of the Google One AI Pro plan, but this is being stripped back with the Pixel 11 series.
As an added bonus for buying the “Gemini phone,” Google has bundled in access to the enhanced AI plans for the past couple of years. This year, the company has decided to slash the trial period to just 6 months for specific handsets and ditched it entirely for the base model this time around.
In the US, the Google One AI Pro Plan starts at $19.99 and gives you 5TB of Drive storage, Google Health Premium, plus expanded Gemini usage. That latter addition has almost been treated as an important component with a modern Pixel, as Gemini is such a key aspect of the experience on the latest devices.
Given how this has been a way to get people using Gemini and may be a way to hide certain advanced device features in the cloud, it’s not a great look. However, it was always expected that these offers would diminish as more functionality came to the AI plan. That said, it’s still disappointing that a phone sold on the back of certain AI functionality may not have access to the frontier models required to enhance the experience.
