Random Reviews AI Showdown (3 of 5): five subscriptions, one wallet.
Google AI Pro: A Very Long Demo in a Bundle
Sixteen months in, I'm still not sure whether I bought an AI subscription or 5TB of storage with a chatbot attached.
What it is, what I paid
Google AI Pro is Google's $19.99-a-month bundle: the Gemini AI features, 5TB of storage across Drive, Gmail, and Photos, and family sharing for up to six people. I didn't start here, though. Back in June 2025 I was paying $1.99 a month for 100GB of storage, and Google kept waving the AI features at me until I upgraded. Sixteen months later, here we are. The storage grew to 5TB along the way, the family got added, and the price landed at twenty bucks.
How I actually used it
Lighter than the others, honestly. I use Gemini regularly, just not heavily. Curriculum research, the occasional deep dive, and the creative toys: image generation, where my best moment was playing with Nano Banana, and music generation, which is fun in a way I didn't expect. The family uses it too, which is rather the point of the bundle. If I'm ranking my AIs by raw capability, Gemini comes third. If I'm ranking by how many people one subscription serves, it laps the field.
What's great
The bundle. Full stop. Five terabytes of storage, flagship AI features, six people, one $19.99 bill. Split six ways that's a few bucks a head, the best per-person math in my entire subscription stack. Nobody else sells it this way. Claude and ChatGPT sell you a brain. Google sells you a family plan that happens to include one.
What annoyed me
Gemini is a step behind Claude and ChatGPT. Not useless, not embarrassing, just third. You feel it on the hard reasoning tasks, the kind where Claude shines. Then there's the blind spot I found while writing this review: I asked Gemini to categorize my last 20 chats, the same homework I gave the others, and it told me it can't pull its own chat history. Claude did it without blinking. That's a strange thing for an AI to not be able to do. The plan itself has been a moving target too: tier changes, storage bumps, a trial conversion, emails about "changes to your subscription" that never quite explain themselves. And the price. Twenty bucks is fair for the bundle, but some months I look at how little I lean on Gemini itself and wonder.
Verdict: ★★★½
Three and a half stars. In my stack, Claude is the workhorse, ChatGPT is the generalist, Google is the bundle bonus I'm still making up my mind about, Grok is the budget generalist, and Muse is the agent. A very long demo in a bundle, sixteen months and counting. Ask me again next month.