If you use Gemini for free, you've got until Friday.
On October 9, Google takes the bigger models away from the free plan.
Free users keep one model: Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite. That's the small, fast one.
Gone from the free plan: 3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro.
(Google has had a busy year of model names. I'm sorry. There won't be a quiz.)
And if you pay $4.99 a month for Google AI Plus? You lose Pro too. You keep 3.6 Flash.
Pro now starts at the $19.99 AI Pro plan.
The internet took it well. One person on X: "Just cancelled my Google AI Plus sub because of this."
Here's the good news. You probably don't need to pay a cent.
You need three days and a plan for where the hard work goes next. Right after this: the three jobs I'd finish on Pro before Friday.
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Right. Back to it.
Three jobs to finish on Pro before Friday
You still have Pro until Friday. Spend it on the heavy work, the stuff a small, fast model isn't built for.
Your longest document. The contract, the report, the manual. Ask for the summary, the risks and the questions you'd want answered. Save the answer.
Your biggest thinking job this month. The pricing decision, the plan for Q4, the "should I hire" question. Give it to the bigger model while you still have it.
Your Gems. Open each one and copy its instructions into a note. They're your best prompts, and you'll want them wherever you go next.
Three jobs. Then Friday arrives, and here's what you're left with.
Flash-Lite is fast. Here's where it runs short.
Google's own page calls Flash-Lite "low-latency, cost-effective." Put simply: fast and cheap to run.
The real catch is how much the free plan can read at once.
On the free plan, Gemini holds about 32,000 tokens in a chat. That's roughly 24,000 words. AI Plus gets 128,000. AI Pro gets 1 million.
So a file that runs past about 24,000 words won't fit in one free chat.
(One independent ranking scores Flash-Lite at 22 and 3.6 Flash at 34. Scores aren't everything, but that's a real gap.)
So where do the long files go now?
Where the hard stuff goes now
For long documents and careful writing: free Claude.
Claude's free plan now runs Sonnet 5.5, the model Anthropic gave free users last week. It's where I'd put the long documents.
For reasoning and planning: free ChatGPT.
The free plan has a Think button. Tap it before you send, and ChatGPT takes longer and works through the problem properly.
And for quick stuff? Keep using free Gemini. Fast and cheap is exactly the job Flash-Lite was built for.
My take: don't pay for Pro unless you hit the wall twice in one week. Split the work instead.
Moving your Gems over
Here's the prompt to bring a Gem's job into Claude or ChatGPT. Paste the instructions you copied, then:
These are the instructions from an assistant I set up in Gemini:
[paste the Gem instructions]
Rewrite them as standing instructions for you. Keep my rules, my tone and my examples. Then ask me the three questions you'd need answered to do this job better than the old version.In Claude, put the result in a Project. In ChatGPT, put it in a Project or a custom GPT's instructions.
If you do want to pay
Three things worth knowing first:
AI Pro is $19.99 a month. From Friday it also gets Deep Think, Google's heaviest thinking mode, and room to read about 1 million tokens at once.
US college students can get a year of AI Pro free. Check Google's student page before you pay.
If you pay $4.99 for AI Plus, Google says you'll get an email with your exact change date. It may not be Friday.
Make it stick
Put a reminder in your calendar for Monday: "Did Flash-Lite cope?"
Use free Gemini as normal over the weekend. Every time it fumbles, move that job to Claude or ChatGPT. By Monday, you'll know if you need to pay at all.
Google changed its free plan this week. A setup that isn't tied to one AI just moves the work somewhere else. That's the whole idea behind The One-Person Company Playbook.
It's the complete setup for running a business where AI does the work of a full team. Inside:
A company folder with your brief, pipeline tracker and invoice log already laid out, so any AI picks up where you left off
Thirty AI roles across six departments, from sales to finance, ready to use
Six jobs that run on a clock: the morning briefing, follow-ups, invoice checks and more
The step-by-step path from picking a business model to your first paying customer
Works on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok, whichever you already pay for. If one of them changes the rules on a Friday, you move the folder and carry on.
The catch: it takes about eight hours over a weekend to set up. After that, it's yours. $97, one-time (down from $297).
Talk tomorrow,
Zephyr
P.S. Which Gemini job are you most worried about losing on Friday? Hit reply. I'll tell you where I'd move it.