Last December, before token maxxing I grabbed AI Pro 5TB promo ~$100 a year, coding was touch and go until 3.8, but now I don't see need for other subs. Sometime summer, they threw in youtube premium lite, maybe for retention at some point. The 5TB cloud storage useful for family sharing. It's almost no brainer except I miss proper youtube premium that locks 3-4x play back speed and queueing. I think its going to be $200/yr after promo ends, I'll probably hold onto it, but wish they can throw in proper yt premium, as in just yt, they can bundle out music (and music video ads). Periodically generating a joke video and images also useful. It's just a solid bundle. I dont even know what home/health premium about. This from someone who got screwed by Google services, but its pretty decent value.

In the past, whenever benchmarks used to show google as being on par with the rest, I tried them and found them extremely lacking.

It's been maybe 6 months since I last tried them in any proper fashion (other than my usual benchmark which is non-coding related), but I was so let down previously, and found it so exhausting to just figure out how to get a subscription working with them, that I really feel like I've given up.

I'm sure I'll get around to trying them. Heck, it could happen today if the mood hits, but....it does need a specific mood. The mood to get over bullshit UX and a profound disdain for the company.

I've not been impressed with their models. Argon seems good but the usage limits on Pro feel worse than Sol/Astra/Opus on competing plans. But where Luna and Haiku have gotten to point of being 'good enough' for grunt work, I don't feel like 3.8 Flash is there.

That view somewhat biased by Flash getting stuck looping in Antigravity's CLI when I asked if it could add plan usage % to the status line. Instead of "no", it first pretended agy was Claude Code and gave me a wrong answer, then resorted to trying to analyse the binary.

Their harness situation is just awful.

I paid and tried it today and the imagen tool just returns a 500, not sure if a fluke but not a great start