There are more AI subscriptions to keep track of now than there are useful things to say about any of them. Every model provider has three tiers and keeps releasing new products and features, all of which are locked behind specific tiers. To me, the sensible move is to just pick one subscription that fits your workflow best and making the most of the free versions of everything else. That’s what I’ve been doing with Claude Pro since I got it.
But NotebookLM kept nagging at me. I hit the free-tier ceiling on sources and notebooks a couple of times now, so I picked up a Google AI Plus subscription mostly to see if the extra headroom would be helpful. I honestly forgot that the subscription carried over to other Google products and was surprised to see my Gemini experience improved noticeably, among other things. That’s why I’m sitting here considering renewing for a second month, which is unusual because I really don’t like hoarding subscriptions.
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NotebookLM got me in the door, but I stayed for the rest of the ecosystem
One subscription and suddenly the whole Google AI lab has more breathing room
I had a growing pile of research projects sitting in NotebookLM, and the free tier caps for notebooks and sources kept hindering my progress. AI Plus bumps that headroom up significantly, five times more sources per notebook, more notebooks overall, and also more audio overviews if you like those. That alone was worth giving it a shot for one month. Then I started noticing my Gemini chats felt better. Responses were more considered, longer conversations weren’t getting cut short as often, and Deep Research reports went way faster and had more depth.
AI Plus gives you expanded access to Gemini 3 Pro, which is Google’s current flagship, along with a 128k context window that’s bigger than what free users get (32k). It’s not the full 1M-token context that AI Pro unlocks, but for most working chats it’s more than fine. I can make do with much lower but this lets me extend a session and not lose the context by having to keep starting a new chat. Deep Research got noticeably better for me too. I don’t use it constantly, but when I want a multi-source synthesis I can actually chew through, having expanded access changes what I’m willing to ask it to give me. The “save your tokens” mentality isn’t there anymore.
The part I’ve enjoyed most, though, is the Google Labs stuff. Tools like Stitch and Opal are free to use with any Google account, so AI Plus doesn’t gate them, but having a subscription running underneath means the models powering them have more room to work, plus you get access to specific features that are paywalled. Stitch has been one of my favorite vibe-designing tools, I’d rate it almost on par with Claude Design, so this alone was tempting enough to have me ditch Claude for Google. Flow does the same thing for video, and AI Plus gives you 200 Flow Credits a month on top of what’s already free.
Circling back to Claude Pro at $20 a month, the comparison is a bit stark. Claude Pro gives you Claude. Great models, Projects, Artifacts, Connectors, Cowork, Code. All excellent, but all inside Claude only. Google AI Plus is cheaper than that and hands you a massive ecosystem to use or experiment with.
I use ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini daily — here’s the only one worth paying for
One stands above the rest.
Gemini’s visual generation stack does something Claude Pro doesn’t do at all
Claude can’t make an image if its life depended on it
I don’t generate images or videos a lot. Part of it is that I’d rather use a real image than a generated one, and part of it is that a lot of the models train on stuff I’d rather not endorse. But there are moments where a generated visual is actually the right call, such as design references that you just can’t find anywhere else, or quick explainer clips that text alone won’t be able to demonstrate.
Nano Banana Pro handles the image side well, and AI Plus gives you more of it. Then Omni, which recently replaced Veo, is where video generation lives now. The quality is genuinely impressive; the way it handles character consistency, lighting, shadows, texture, and motion across multi-turn edits is something I hadn’t really seen from other video models yet. It’s free to use in YouTube Create and Shorts. And AI Plus is what unlocks Omni inside the Gemini app itself.
Claude doesn’t do any of this. It accepts vision as input but it can’t generate images or videos. What Claude does produce visually is SVG diagrams and HTML artifacts through its inline visual tools, which are excellent for explaining a system or showing a flow, but that’s illustrative work, not generative. So I’m paying more for Claude Pro and getting zero image or video generation, while Google AI Plus hands me both at a cheaper price.
Gemini has Canvas as well, which is closer to Claude’s artifacts, and honestly Claude is still ahead on the interactive artifact side. But when you zoom out, having a whole media generation stack sitting next to your chat model for less than Claude Pro is quite something.
I tested Gemini Notebooks and Claude Projects side by side, and one didn’t make the cut
Same idea, different answers
What Google AI Plus can’t replace
Why I subscribed to Claude in the first place
I got Claude Pro for the same reason I got Google AI Plus: fewer usage caps and more room to work with. The five-hour reset kept hitting me before I was ready to stop, and five Projects on the free tier wasn’t cutting it once I started using them properly. Pro gave me unlimited Projects and much longer sessions, plus the newer models. That was really it, I wasn’t chasing any specific feature at the time.
Then Claude Design happened. Stitch is closer to a prompt-to-UI generator where you describe what you want and it hands you a structured output, which is genuinely useful and I’ll keep using it. But Claude Design lets me sit with a piece and iterate on it, and the Figma connector means I can push work back and forth as a native file with layers, frames, and components intact. This workflow is more useful to me.
And then there’s Claude Code, which I started using recently and not for coding at all. It reads my Obsidian vault so I can point it at my notes and drafts and ask it to restructure a folder or pull things across dozens of files. Skills and CLAUDE.md let me set up recurring workflows without having to re-explain what I’m doing every session. Using a dev tool for note management is one of the best productivity workflows I have, because it’s basically just file access and plain text, which is highly adaptive.
Both stay, for now
I think I’m renewing my Google AI Plus subscription, which is not something I say lightly because I really don’t like sitting on multiple subs. Google gave me more than I actually signed up for and that’s a real value proposition. But even though I considered dropping Claude Pro for it, it just gives me too much value to just let it go. So for now, I’ll be keeping both.
