Google tried to offer a free tier for students and people to TRY it. That's a LOT different because they were up front about limits. You pay for Gemini by the

Google tried to offer a free tier for students and people to TRY it. That's a LOT different because they were up front about limits. You pay for Gemini by the token and you get the full firehose. It costs money, but less than Opus and it smokes that. It just works. Gemini 2.5 Pro is the king of AI coding and literally everything else has to catch up. Trust me, I can't wait until there's a model that can run locally that's as good...but for now there isn't. Always just look at the token cost and get used the token economics. Go into it paying. You'll get better results. I think people thinking they were somehow cheating and getting away with something similar (or better) for $20/mo are in for a big surprise. I don't know if I would say they should have known better of course. I think Anthropic and Cursor and Windsurf were hiding it a bit. Now it's all coming out into the open and I guess you know the saying, if it's too good to be true...