The End of Unlimited Prompts: Google Drops $100 “AI Ultra” Tier and Shifts to Metered Compute Billing

Google I/O 2026 introduced a major rework of Google AI subscriptions, including a new $100 AI Ultra tier and a reduced $200 top-tier, a shift from message-count limits to a 'Compute-Used' billing model, and new multimodal and agent-focused capabilities (Gemini Omni, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini Spark, Project Genie). The announcement also details bundled services (20TB storage, YouTube Premium, Health/Home Premium), rolling compute replenishment with metered top-ups, and platform-level fallbacks to local models to manage high-throughput usage, framed as a strategic move to monetize and lock in users across cloud and content ecosystems.