It's arguably the most powerful LLM out there right now and I dont get throttled as much as Chatgpt plus (which has a monthly membership and less powerful it seems).

I noticed that Gemini 2.5 Pro suddenly appeared in my options and now I can use it. But is it really free? Is there a usage limit? Or is it unlimited? Because I didn't subscribe to any plan.

As everyone know, Copilot limit the premium models to 300 request/month. Google on the other hand is looking to expend their business and are now offering 100 request per day for free of Gemini 2.5 Pro on their API. It's back on the free tier!

• 100 RPD (Request Per Day) for Gemini 2.5 Pro

• 250 RPD for Gemini 2.5 Flash. (It was 500 until now, so they lowered that, but that model is mostly 4.1 intelligence level, maybe slightly above or below depending on the language. And 250 per day is already more than enough.)

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits

Update: Now they updated the model in the list, just go to the Manage Models... in the model selector and click Gemini, enter your API key from Google AI Studio, select both Pro and Flash and you are good to go.

Make sure you use Gemini 2.5 Pro at the bottom of the list, if not, it count toward your 300 requests.

The model is much smarter than the free 4.1. So that's ~3000 request per month + your 300 premium that you can keep for Sonnet 4. I hope it helps someone. I will surely use that most of the time now instead of the 4.1.

I subscribed to the premium subscription for Gemini Pro but noticed that even the free version can use the same models (2.5 pro). So, what is the catch? What is the difference between the free and paid versions? Should i cancel my subscription and use the free version? As of today, 24/05/2025.

For some reason there is a cost counter text to it, and I am getting paranoid

Does anyone know how to do that?

EDIT May 12: Google added new rate limits to AI studio this morning, 25 RPD, so this is effectively no longer working. We had a good run!
EDIT: The Open Router integration and google ai studio key method seems like the easiest way that works for everyone, especially if you already have an openrouter account. Pasting that method here for visibility:

1. Get a Google AI Studio API key from https://aistudio.google.com/apikey

2. Plug that API key into the Google AI Studio integration on https://openrouter.ai/settings/integrations, select enabled but not "Use as fallback"

3. You can now use your Openrouter key anywhere and as long as you select Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental as your model, it will use your key. (4. If you also add a GCP key and have Vertex AI enabled for the project, obtained as per the instructions below, you can add that to your integrations as well, and you will have two sources of 2.5 Pro backing your Openrouter calls.)

Hey all,
After dealing with Openrouter and Requesty giving me constant rate limits for Gemini 2.5 Pro, I got frustrated and decided to get things set up directly through Google's APIs. I have now sent over 60 million tokens in a single day without hitting any rate limits, all for $0—an equivalent usage with Claude would have cost $180. I also had a few other engineers confirm these steps. Here's how to do it and then integrate with Roo Code--but this should work for other tools like Cline, too:

Setting Up Google Cloud

1. Create or log into your Google Cloud account.

2. Open the Google Cloud Console.

3. Create a new Google Cloud project (I named mine "Roo Code").

4. Enable billing for your newly created Google Cloud project.

5. Enable the Vertex AI API.

6. Enable the Gemini API from the API overview page.

7. In your project dashboard, navigate to APIs & Services → Credentials.

8. Click "Create Credentials" → "API Key".

9. Copy the generated API key and save it securely.

Integrating with Your IDE (Example: Roo Code)

1. In VSCode or Cursor, navigate to the extensions marketplace (Shift + Cmd + X on Mac), search for and install "Roo Code" (or your preferred tool like Cline).

2. Open Roo Code (Cmd + Shift + P, then type "View: Show Roo Code").

3. Click to configure a new API provider, selecting "Google Gemini".

4. Paste the API key you saved earlier into the API key field.

5. Select "google/gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25:free" as the model.

6. Click Save.

There you go! Happy coding. Let me know if you run into any issues.

Edit: looks like some are having issues. A few ideas/alternatives:

1. Use a Vertex api key, but gemini api as provider in Roo Code. There is only one key, ignore this alternative.

2. Use vertex api as the provider in Roo Code--its just a little more complicated, you'll have to create a service account in the credentials page of the project, and paste the json in Roo Code when configuring the provider

3. If you have an OpenRouter account, you can go to the integrations page https://openrouter.ai/settings/integrations and add your vertex api key to the google vertex integration. You can also add a google ai studio api key to the Google AI Studio integration. In each setting window where you add the key, make sure it is enabled. Then, in Roo Code, you use your openrouter account, but whenever it uses Gemini 2.5 pro free, it will default to your API key, not one of theirs which is being rotated among many users.

Yesterday my budget email went off that I went over $5. Soon as I saw I stopped, dashboard said $12. Now today it is $70+ - beware of billing delays.

Attached is proof, notice the Experimental in the SKUs:

After showing the chat rep evidence of this and that Google advertises the experimental as "free" they researched for 5 minutes and said "This is our current policy, but I will look into a refund". I asked for documentation or evidence of their policy that experimental is no longer free. They avoided.

Apparently, they're also working on bringing it to the mobile app.

Just noticed today I executed 200 requests and it still works for free! Whatever it is redirected to, it is not flash but 2.5 pro level model. Maybe it is still old.

Output SOTA reasoning traces to distill and SFT into Gemma 3! If you are a dev with a https://console.cloud.google.com/ account with billing setup you will have FREE access to gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25 (an update that came out 20250404) through https://aistudio.google.com/ even before it is available on https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai

Somehow able to use this without Gemini Advanced, didn't have them in my other accounts tho.

If you start a conversation on the web and then continue it on the gemini app, for some reasons it continues without showing any limits. Maybe it will be patched soon by the time the model drops on the android app but rn its free.

Can i use Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview 03-25 in AI Studio for free until my free prompts + tokens are burned?

Im kinda afraid of receiving a huge bill after i vibe coded yesterday some minutes with it until i saw the prices thing.

Input/Output Pricing

Google wants to smash OpenAi, it takes personal 🤣

Gemini 2.5 no longer for free?

Hello. I use Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental for Creative Writing and Coding but now it's not longer on Google AI Studio. I know that Preview is paid so is there an alternative? I don't have the money to spend on AI subscriptions or bills.