AI subscriptions seem to keep getting more expensive, with a variety of offerings exceeding the $200 a month mark. But now, the big companies seem to be offering a remedy for that, with Google announcing a bargain Gemini plan in a host of new countries.
AI Plus, a more affordable subscription to Gemini, has just been made available in over 40 new countries, including Angola, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, Vietnam, and more.
This isn’t the first announcement of the plan. It was first revealed in Indonesia earlier this month. When it launched in Indonesia, it cost $4.50 a month, and has been given a $5 a month price tag in most of the countries it has been announced for.
This new tier offers a lot of the main features of Gemini. In a blog post, Google explains that you get access to Gemini 2.5 Pro, as well as tools like Flow, Whisk, and video creation via Veo 3 Fast. It also includes NotebookLM access and Gemini features in Google services. You even get 200GB of cloud storage.
Currently, it is not clear how many countries this new plan will roll out to, but Google has said they are looking to expand it further.
How does this compare to other plans?
Google isn’t the only company to launch a more affordable plan. OpenAI recently announced ‘ChatGPT Go’. This is a $5 a month version of the popular chatbot that has so far only been released in India and Indonesia.
It sits between the free version of ChatGPT and its $20 a month subscription. It gives users 10 times the usage limits for sending prompts, generating images and uploading files, but is still limited compared to OpenAI’s more expensive plans.
So far, both companies seem to be trialing these plans in countries that don’t use the software as much. If it proves popular, it could well come to the US. This is an important opposition to the quickly rising AI subscription costs, with a number of companies unveiling $200 a month plans.
AI chatbots and the services that come with them aren’t cheap to run. If they can upgrade a lot of their free users to a paid model, it could help to cover some of the high costs companies like Google and OpenAI are facing.
While no similar plans have been announced from the likes of Claude, Perplexity or Grok, they could well follow up. The AI companies do seem to replicate each other in these kinds of areas.
Are these plans worth getting?
If you’re based in one of the countries this is currently available in, or are hoping it will come to you soon, is it actually worth getting one of these plans? Well, yes.
For a lot of people, these two plans are going to hit the perfect balance of available features and costs. Most AI plans seem to start at around $20 a month. That is a sizable cost, especially if you aren’t a huge chatbot user.
This instead lifts some of the limits that can be frustrating on tools like Gemini and ChatGPT, but does it without lumping you with a hefty fee. Overall, the value does seem to be better from Gemini with these more affordable packages.
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