Google Cuts AI Ultra to $100, Launches Gemini Spark Agent and Android XR Glasses at I/O 2026
Google Cuts AI Ultra to $100, Launches Gemini Spark Agent and Android XR Glasses at I/O 2026
Publish Date: 2026-05-19 14:49:00
Source Domain: www.techtimes.com
Google kicked off its annual developer conference Tuesday morning with a keynote at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California that carried an unusually direct consequence for anyone who pays for Google AI: the company halved the entry price for its top-tier AI subscription and replaced daily prompt limits with a metering system that charges by computational cost rather than message count.
CEO Sundar Pichai opened the two-day Google I/O 2026 event, which runs through Wednesday, May 20, by noting it has been ten years since Google committed to making AI the center of its product strategy. The conference’s answer to the question of whether that bet has paid off arrived in a wave of simultaneous launches across Gemini, Search, Gmail, YouTube, and hardware.
New $100 AI Ultra Plan Changes What Google AI Costs
The most immediately actionable announcement for Google’s paying users is a restructuring of its subscription tiers. Google AI Ultra now starts at $100 per month — down from $250 — and is aimed at developers, technical leads, knowledge workers, and advanced creators. Google simultaneously lowered its previous $250 top tier to $200, keeping capabilities identical.
The $100 plan includes a 5x higher usage limit in the Gemini app than the existing $20 AI Pro tier, 20 terabytes of cloud storage, YouTube Premium, and — starting next week for US subscribers — beta access to Gemini Spark.
Alongside the price restructuring, Google announced that the Gemini app is moving away from daily prompt limits in favor of a “compute-used” model. Under that system, a simple text message consumes less of a subscriber’s monthly allowance than a complex video-editing or coding request — a change Google describes as a fairer way to allocate access, though it also means heavy users of video or agentic features could exhaust their budget faster than they did under a flat daily limit. When a subscriber reaches their cap on flagship models, the system shifts them to the…
