Just when you thought Google’s AI plans couldn’t get any more premium, along comes Google AI Ultra, a new top-tier subscription that’ll set you back an astounding $249.99 per month. Yes, you read that right, per month.
Announced at Google I/O, the price of the AI Ultra Plan is akin to a high-end creative suite, a month’s worth of shopping or even a monthly payment for a car. To charge that amount, Google has to offer a serious set of AI-powered tools and services.
Turns out, it actually does. It looks like Google is throwing everything including the proverbial kitchen sink at the plan with the aim to attract power users, whether that’s creators, filmmakers, developers, researchers or die-hard AI fans who want to be on the absolute bleeding edge of AI advancements.
Here’s everything you get with Google’s incredibly expensive AI Ultra plan, available in the US right now.
Google Gemini
Of course, as you might expect, Google’s top-end AI plan comes with benefits for Google’s AI-powered assistant, Gemini.
Those who subscribe will get access to the highest usage limits, including within its Deep Research mode, which can generate full reports on complex queries. You’ll also get early access to Deep Think in Gemini 2.5 Pro, offering an upgraded reasoning engine for more nuanced, multi-step problem solving.
You’ll also get early access to Gemini inside Chrome, a new feature announced at Google I/O, which essentially lets AI analyse and interact with webpages in real-time – though this is also available to cheaper AI Pro subscribers. Google claims that this can help with summarising articles, autofilling forms or even booking a holiday based on what’s on-screen.
It’s also safe to assume that Ultra-level subscribers will be among the first to access new Gemini features as they roll out in the future.
Google Flow
Google Flow is an entirely new feature based on Google’s suite of image-generation technology, and it sounds like it could be huge for content creation and film-making.
Announced at Google I/O, Flow makes use of DeepMind’s flagship models including Veo, Imagen and Gemini, to generate cinematic-level videos from text-based prompts.
It’s available in a limited form with the more consumer-focused AI Pro plan, but with the Ultra plan, you’ll get access to premium features like 1080p video generation, along with more advanced camera controls and the highest usage limits.
You’ll also be among the first to get access to Veo 3, first teased at Google I/O, which Google claims will ‘take visual storytelling to the next level’.
Of course, AI video generation, as with image generation, is still massively controversial, so it’ll be interesting to see how consumers react to AI-generated video content – or if they can spot it at all.
Google Whisk
Google Whisk is a similar concept to Flow, though it’s focused more on image prompts than text prompts. In essence, it can take a single image and turn it into a short animated clip up to eight seconds in length. It’s currently powered by Veo 2, and I can only assume it’ll get the Veo 3 upgrade once that begins rolling out.
The Big G claims that this could be particularly handy in the planning process for pitching ideas and mocking up content.
As with Flow, it’s also available with the AI Pro plan, but the AI Ultra plan gets the highest usage caps.
Google NotebookLM
Google’s NotebookLM is one of the unsung heroes of Google’s suite of AI tools. One of the biggest problems with AI chatbots is that you can’t control where the information it gathers comes from. NotebookLM fixes that by allowing the AI to only analyse content you share, be it PDFs, chunks of text or anything else that comes to mind.
You can then use Gemini to ask questions or generate content around what you’ve shared, including the (frankly impressive) ability to generate a short podcast. This makes it so much easier to digest potentially challenging topics in a much easier form, with a surprisingly natural back-and-forth between the virtual podcast hosts.
Now, none of this is exclusive to NotebookLM – in fact, it’s available free of charge – but Ultra plan subscribers, as with other features, get the highest usage limits available.
Google has also said that Ultra subscribers will be the first to get new features and improved model capabilities later this year, though the exact details of what to expect are TBC.
Project Mariner
Project Mariner is one of the more interesting benefits of the AI Ultra plan; the experimental “agentic research prototype” can handle up to ten tasks simultaneously, including functions like research, bookings and purchases, all from a single dashboard.
It’s still very early days for Project Mariner, and it’s still evolving, but it could soon become your AI concierge.
It’s certainly not for consumers
At $249.99 a month for US subscribers, it’s clearly not intended to be a mainstream product – that’s what the newly rebranded AI Pro subscription is for. But if you’re a high-end creator or video professional, there could be enough here to tempt you – especially with 50% off for your first three months.
