I like Gemini 2.5 Pro, too, and recently, I tried different AI products (including the Gemini Pro plan) because I wanted a good AI chat assistant for everyday use. But I also wanted to reduce my spending and have fewer subscriptions.
The Gemini Pro subscription is included with Google One, which is very convenient if you use Google Drive. But I already have an iCloud subscription tightly integrated with iOS, so switching to Drive and losing access to other iCloud functionality (like passwords) wasn’t in my plans.
Then there is the Gemini chat UI, which is light years behind the OpenAI ChatGPT client for macOS.
NotebookLM is good at summarizing documents, but the experience isn’t integrated with the Gemini chat, so it’s like constantly switching between Google products without a good integrated experience.
The result is that I end up paying a subscription to Raycast AI because the chat app is very well integrated with other Raycast functions, and I can try out models. I don’t get the latest model immediately, but it has an integrated experience with my workflow.
My point in this long description is that by being spread across many products, Google is losing on the UX side compared to OpenAI (for general tasks) or Anthropic (for coding). In just a few months, Google tried to catch up with v0 (Google Stitch), GH Copilot/Cursor (with that half-baked VSCode plugin), and now Claude Code. But all the attempts look like side-projects that will be killed soon.
It's not in Basic, Standard or Premium.
It's in a new tier called "Google AI Pro" which I think is worth inclusion in your catalogue of product confusion.
Oh wait, there's even more tiers that for some reason can't be paid for annually. Weird... why not? "Google AI Ultra" and some others just called Premium again but now include AI. 9 tiers, 5 called Premium, 2 with AI in the name but 6 that include Gemini. What a mess.
Tip: If you do annual billing for "Premium (5 TB)", you end up paying $21/month for 5TB of storage and the same AI features of "Google AI pro (2TB)"; which is only $1/month more than doing "Google AI Pro (2 TB)" (which only has monthly billing)
Apple is selling you a huge lucrative market.
Customers buy Apple’s curated marketplace.
Apple takes a cut for being in the middle and enabling all of this.
Believe me, I would never pay for most of the apps that I did pay for via Apple if it wasn’t via their marketplace and their consumer protections.
There is no counterfactual scenario where you and millions(!) of other ISVs get 100% of the same money without Apple.
What’s difficult to understand about these business relationships?
Enabling this like Ticketmaster enables selling tickets.
In ticketmaster's case I believe they give kickbacks and lucrative exclusive contracts with large venues, to squeeze smaller ones, maybe making whole tours use it but only kicking back to the biggest or select venues on the tour I think.
Apple sometimes does special deals and special rules with important providers, among many other tactics behind their moat. All single signons must also offer apple single sign-on, for instance, and they have even disabled access to customer accounts using their single sign-on for unrelated business disputes, though they walked it back in the big public example I'm aware of, the threat is there if you go against them in any way.
Ticketmaster is in no way comparable, because they gouge customers and provide no protections.
Someone in the music industry explained that both bands and venues like Ticketmaster because then Ticketmaster is the "bad guy" and the band can just shrug their shoulders and pretend to be the victim while profiting enormously from Ticketmaster's evil practices.
Okay, all the app developers pull out of iOS because they're not actually useful, in fact they should be paying Apple!
How many people do you think would still buy iPhones if there are 0 apps on the app store? Lmaooo, it's almost like it's a co-operative relationship and Apple don't deserve a huge cut because it's the apps that sell their phones.
No way for you to scam me or make it hard ro cancel. I can view them all in the apple account subscription view.
No tricks, no unexpected behaviour.
I could see Stripe doing something like this. They protect the consumer and come down hard on the merchants.
Imagine them, and maybe a few other processors, competing for this business. The fee would probably drop below 30%. To a large degree, this is the sort of arrangement credit card processors already have between their merchants and consumers and that rate is single digit percentages. Not hard to imagine Visa or MasterCard running a SaaS transaction service for a 5-10% cut.
Stripe already is a second place, non centralized, off platform.
I don't want to hunt down my predatory subscriptions in multiple places.
30% is a robbery, and the confusion on the customer "ownership" is true, but it's not useful for the discussion to negate the advantage the _garden_ offers to the basic consumer
In the same vein: Games don’t cost less on the epic store despite their lower (compared to Steam) either, so as an end user it makes no difference where I buy games.
But I found it to a little bit clunky and I guess I like the ui of google, I mean, the point is to get the point across. If you really hate the gemini ui, I am pretty sure that there is stylus extension which can beautify it or change the styles to your looking.
I guess I am an android user but still I understand your icloud subscription but if you're only choice as to why to not switch to google is passwords (but maybe you can mention more?), then for passwords, please try bitwarden, I found it to be really delightful.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250611035305/https://one.googl...
I wonder what it will be next week.
you can export and import the passwords and you can sync your photos to google photos
I'm sure there is technically nothing that stopped you from treating this "Pay with Apple" thing as just another payment method inside the google account, except maybe additional complexity and red-tape.
Seen this many times when PMs, POs, and Devs code by features instead of trying to actually solve something. I don't even want to know what mess of a database schema is behind this monstrosity.
Maybe you like paying an extra 20%. That's your business. But fees like that affect the viability of lots of business ideas, including games. Having lower fees increases the pool of indie games.