Gemini 2.5 Pro is now free to all users in surprise move

Earlier this week, Google unveiled Gemini 2.5, the company’s most advanced AI model to date, with integrated thinking capabilities. It is capable of analyzing complex information with contextual nuance to draw logical conclusions with more accuracy than ever.

As users have come to expect, this new model was initially exclusive for those willing to pay $20 per month for Gemini Advanced membership. But less than a week later, Google has surprised everyone by making it immediately available to free users too.

“The team is sprinting, TPUs are running hot, and we want to get our most intelligent model into more people’s hands asap,” the official Gemini App X account wrote in a thread justifying the move. “Which is why we decided to roll out Gemini 2.5 Pro (experimental) to all Gemini users, beginning today.”

With plenty of Advanced subscribers responding to the post asking what exactly they’re paying for if free users get access to the new model too, the official account stressed that Advanced users still get the better experience. Not only do they get a “longer context window”, but “free users have rate limits on this model, which do not apply to Advanced users”.

The official documentation does indeed make it clear that power users will want a paid account. For the Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental model, Advanced subscribers get four times the requests per minute (20 vs 5) and Requests per day (100 vs 25), as well as double the number of tokens per minute (2 million instead of 1 million).

While Gemini’s 2.5 model hasn’t even been available for a week yet, it is already impressing. It’s at the top of the LMArena leaderboard, leapfrogging ChatGPT 4o, and beating its rivals on math, creative writing and science benchmarks. It does, however, lag behind its Open AI rival in terms of coding and following multi-turn exchanges.

Impressively, Gemini 2.5 achieved a score of 18.8% on Humanity’s Last Exam — a test designed to push AI’s use of complex knowledge to the limit — putting it ahead of Open AI o3-mini (14%), GPT-4.5 (6.4%), Claude 3.7 Sonnet (8.9%) and DeepSeek R1 (8.6%).

That’s still a little behind the 26% achieved by OpenAI’s Deep Research model, but the comparison is somewhat unfair, as unlike its rivals, it has the ability to search the web, which is useful for the test’s general knowledge-based questions.

You can try Gemini 2.5 free of charge on the official Gemini website. App support for free users is also coming soon, the account says.