A Reminder That Google Gemini’s Best Features Are All Behind a Paywall

Exciting news this week for folks who rely on the Google Workspace suite for everyday tasks: A new feature from Gemini in Gmail lets you quickly add the mere mention of an event to your calendar with just a button. It’s way easier than adding an event now, which requires manually adding it in another window. However, read the fine print, and you’ll see that this feature isn’t free for everyone. It’s a hearty reminder that AI’s best features will likely be behind a paywall.

I don’t have this particular Gemini ability on my Google account yet. It just started rolling out yesterday and is expected to reach completion by the middle of next month. It could be a few weeks before it reaches you. Also, you’ll need a paid tier of either Google Workspace or Google One AI Premium to access it. The latter starts at $20 a month with 2TB of storage space on the backend and unlocks additional Gemini abilities, including access to Gemini 2.0 Pro and Deep Research.

Gemini’s most practical abilities are behind a paywall. One of my favorite Gemini abilities is that it can tackle up to 1,500 pages of PDF at a time. It’s been incredible for research purposes, and since I’ve had the ability, I’ve fooled all my friends into thinking I’m a horoscope queen. I figured out how to feed Gemini their birth charts and then ask questions about their personalities and traits. It gave me a deeper understanding of all this stuff so I could make faster connections between different elements.

Despite having perused dozens of press releases about what’s new in Gemini as part of my day job, it hadn’t clicked that I was using a paid feature until recently. Since then, I’ve periodically checked in with my Google One account to see what’s new there. I also went into my Gmail settings and turned on all the “smart” features, which rely on AI for their magic. This includes stuff like this calendar events feature, though it hasn’t yet been rolled out.

While researching this piece, I found this dead link to a question someone asked a mere nine hours ago. The question is, “Why are some Gemini features locked behind a paywall?” It’s still popping up in search engines for whatever reason. Will Google answer it?