I understand the changes made to the Free Tier. With Gemini 3.0, Antigravity (Really good!), and Nano Banana being integrated into the ecosystem there was fresh demand on a limited resource.
As someone who has spent the last year evangelizing the Free Tier to developers that didn’t have a budget, mostly students and those starting out in programming, I even tried to give caveats that the service levels and quotas would change unexpectedly, such as when the Native Image generation dropped from 1000 to 100.
A few months ago I remember Logan saying in a public forum that one of the things that concerned him was the ability of a new developer to release an app and not be hit with an API bill that was really large. The Free Tier is something that allows for the development of these apps in a way that can be thoroughly tested before release.
My only request is that Gemini’s Free Tier API get consideration as a first class citizen in the future. Not so that it can be a replacement for the paid tier, but so that those who want to learn and teach with it have some sort of assurance that it’s not going to just disappear in the middle of a demonstration. Perhaps if the Free Tier could be formulated not as a hard limit, but as a minimum guarantee with overhead based on availability? That would go a long ways towards avoiding the surprise of a suddenly non-functional application.
I really like the Gemini API and I hope this can be seen as constructive.