Google quietly pulled the plug on free API access to Gemini 2.5 Pro over the weekend, leaving developers scrambling to either pay up or abandon their projects entirely.
Users started noticing the change when their applications began timing out with 429 errors. No announcement. No warning. Just gone.
When developers checked their rate limits in AI Studio, Gemini 2.5 Pro had vanished from the free tier completely, dropped to zero requests per day. Even worse, Gemini 2.5 Flash got slashed from 250 requests per day down to just 20. That’s a 92% cut.
“RIP, it served well,” wrote one Reddit user in r/Bard, kicking off a thread that’s now filled with over a hundred frustrated developers.
Logan Kilpatrick, Google’s Product Lead for AI Studio and Gemini API, eventually showed up in the comments to explain what happened. His take? The free tier is only intended for quickly testing new models before building with them.
The whole goal of the free tier is to give you a small taste of the model and if it works well for you, get you moved over to paid. It is not intended to be something you rely on for ongoing projects and products. That is what the paid tier is for. – Logan Kilpatrick
In a separate Google discussion thread, Kilpatrick dropped an even more revealing detail. The 2.5 Pro free tier “was originally only supposed to be available for a single weekend.” That’s right. A weekend. What developers had been building on for months was apparently never meant to last beyond a couple of days.
The real culprit, according to Kilpatrick, is compute constraints. Google needed to free up TPU capacity for Gemini 3.0 Pro and Nano Banana Pro. He also mentioned they’re dealing with “at scale fraud and abuse” on the paid Tier 1, which forced them to slash limits there too, from 10,000 requests per day down to just 300.
The timing couldn’t be worse. Google dropped Gemini 3.0 Pro right as OpenAI stumbled with GPT-5.1, positioning itself as the superior alternative. But apparently, they weren’t ready for the massive influx of users that followed.
If this feels familiar, that’s because it is. Back in May, Google pulled nearly the same move, removing 2.5 Pro’s free tier and slashing Flash limits. They brought it back a few months later in a “more limited capacity.” Now, with another compute crunch, it’s gone again.
The lack of communication is what’s really getting under developers’ skin. “You can’t remove a service like this without any notice to your user base,” one developer complained. “It’s an absolute lack of respect.”
The exodus has already begun. DeepSeek 3.2 keeps coming up in the discussion threads as the go-to alternative. At around $0.42 per million output tokens and $0.28 per million input tokens (with temporary promotional pricing even lower), it’s dirt cheap compared to what Google would now charge.
Others are migrating to OpenRouter, which offers 50 free model requests per day by default and bumps that to 1,000 requests per day if you top up just $10 once.
Kilpatrick says Google is “hoping we end up with enough free cycles” to offer a free tier for 3.0 models eventually, but it all depends on the compute situation. For now, if you want to use Gemini 2.5 Pro via API, you’re paying or you’re leaving.
Dwayne Cubbins
1804 Posts
My fascination with Android phones began the moment I got my hands on one. Since then, I've been on a journey to decode the ever-evolving tech landscape, fueled by a passion for both the "how" and the "why." Since 2018, I've been crafting content that empowers users and demystifies the tech world. From in-depth how-to guides that unlock your phone's potential to breaking news based on original research, I strive to make tech accessible and engaging.
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