Does anyone working in an individual capacity actually end up paying for Gemini (Flash or Pro)? Or does Google boil you like a frog and you end up subscribing?
I've used Gemini in a lot of personal projects. At this point I've probably made tens of thousands of requests, sometimes exceeding 1k per week. So far, I haven't had to pay a dime!
You get 1500 prompts on AIStudio across a few Gemini flash models. I think I saw 250 or 500 for 2.5. It’s basically free and beats the consumer rate limits of big apps (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, meta). I wonder when they’ll cut this off.
I've paid a few dollars a month for my API usage for about 6 months.
If I actually had time to work on my hobby projects Gemini pro would be the first thing I’d spend money on. As is, it’s amazing how much progress you can squeeze out of those 5 chats every 24h; I can get a couple hours of before-times hacking done in 15 minutes, which is incidentally when free usage gets throttled and my free time runs out.