It's a ploy to drive adoption. Once it's considered essential they can turn the screws in massive contracts with governments, big enterprises, universities, and public school systems. Probably some genuine competition on price, but the equilibrium price is probably below cost and not sustainable.

If only it came with YouTube Premium... Most of that list is just AI in existing products which is not all that interesting. You get better value and models through ChatGPT or Claude especially if you are a developer

Thank you for this comment and holy cow, I have the pro subscription and didn't know it came with that many bells.

The government does subsidize basic banking, though?

That's not close to "everything ... any consumer might need". It's a list of useless things, other than 5TB of storage. Granted, cloud storage typically sells for more than this, so they are offering Gemini for something like -$15/mo.

I had a free 3 month trial I just terminated. I deemed it too expensive.