Google stopped serving its free Gemini coding assistant tier

The setup

Gemini Code Assist is Google's IDE coding assistant, and its own pricing page, retrieved 16 September 2026, describes two paid editions: Standard at $22.80 per user per month, or $19 annual, and Enterprise at $54 per user per month, or $45 annual. A third option, Gemini Code Assist for individuals, had offered a no-cost way into the same IDE extensions. Google's own documentation for that consumer tier records that this changed: starting 18 June 2026, the IDE extensions stopped serving requests for the individuals, Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra tiers, including Gemini CLI, with Google account sign-in no longer available on that path.

What the documents show

The same page states plainly who is affected: a Standard or Enterprise subscription is explicitly unaffected, with IDE and CLI access unchanged. Users of the retired free tier are directed instead to what the page calls the Antigravity family of products, with its own pricing structure. On data handling, the paid-tier pricing page states its governance policy helps ensure customer code, inputs and generated recommendations will not be used to train shared models or develop products, a vendor claim about Standard and Enterprise specifically, not a description of how the discontinued free tier had been governed.

The friction

The consumer-tier notice is dated by its own footer to 2 September 2026 and points to a Google I/O announcement for the underlying decision, but does not restate the reasoning, only the effect and migration path. That leaves a gap for anyone who adopted the free tier because it required no subscription: the replacement line has its own quota and terms, described only by a link to separate Antigravity pricing, so the free-to-paid transition is not fully documented on the page announcing it.

What changed in the work

What the sources support is a narrowing: a company evaluating Gemini in an IDE without a paid seat lost that option in mid-2026, while teams already on Standard or Enterprise saw no change. The current product overview page, read alongside the pricing page, shows the free-tier framing has also left the vendor's own top-level documentation, which now describes only two editions. That is an editorial read worth stating plainly: the on-ramp for no-cost evaluation is gone, and what remains is a subscription decision from the first install.

• Has a team's Gemini Code Assist usage been confirmed as Standard or Enterprise, or was it running on the now-retired individual tier?
• What does the Antigravity pricing page state about quota limits compared with what the free tier previously allowed?
• Does the vendor's no-training statement for Standard and Enterprise appear anywhere in the migration guidance for the Antigravity products?

A pricing and access page that quietly narrows its own free path is itself a data point on how conditional a free-tier claim can be, and it is worth rechecking any setup that was built on one.