What the AI on Your New Phone Actually Costs

Update, 15 September 2026. Apple now states that its server-side Apple Intelligence features, including Siri AI and Image Playground, are subject to daily usage limits, and that “expanded access to such features will be available for a fee in the future.” Apple Intelligence still carries no subscription today, so the figures below stand, but Apple has said in writing it will not stay entirely free. Details in how to turn Apple Intelligence off.

Two makers, two ways of charging, and only one of them is a subscription. Google publishes four paid AI tiers above its free one, from $4.99 to $199.99 a month. Apple publishes no price at all and requires a recent iPhone instead.

Both are a cost. Only one of them appears on a bill.

The ladder, in a year

	Monthly	A year
Apple Intelligence	no subscription	$0
Gemini, free tier	$0	$0
Google AI Plus	$4.99	$59.88
Google AI Pro	$19.99	$239.88
Google AI Ultra	$99.99	$1,199.88
Google AI Ultra, top	$199.99	$2,399.88

Prices are Google’s and Apple’s own, read on 5 September 2026. Annual figures are the monthly price times twelve. Introductory discounts are excluded: several tiers were discounted heavily on the day we read the page, and an introductory price is not a price.

What you are actually buying is a quota

This is the part the advertising does not lead with. Google’s tiers are sold on usage limits, not on capability — its own page describes them as two times, four times, five times and up to twenty times the level below.

That framing is unusually honest, and it changes the question. You are not choosing which features you get so much as how often you can use them before the service slows you down. Nobody buying a phone in a shop is in a position to know how many prompts a month they will run, which means the tier is close to unguessable at the point of sale.

The practical consequence: start at free and let the limits tell you. A tier you outgrow announces itself. A tier you overbought never does.

Apple’s version is not free, it is bundled

Apple charges nothing for Apple Intelligence and conditions it on an Apple Intelligence–enabled device. That is not generosity, it is the cost moved into the handset, and it has a sharper edge than a subscription: a subscription can be cancelled, and a phone that is one generation too old cannot be upgraded into eligibility.

It also means the honest comparison is not “free versus $19.99 a month”. It is “a new phone every few years versus a monthly line item”, and which of those is cheaper depends entirely on how long you keep a handset.

What to actually do

• Do not pay for an AI tier at the same time as buying the phone. The free tier will tell you within a month whether you are hitting a limit, and nothing is lost by waiting.
• Check what the tier bundles before comparing it to a rival. Google’s plans include cloud storage, so a household already paying for storage separately is comparing the wrong two numbers.
• Ignore an introductory price entirely. Ours is the same rule as anywhere else on this site: the number that matters is what it renews at.
• If you are buying an iPhone as a gift, check the model is eligible, because that is the whole of Apple’s paywall and it cannot be fixed afterwards.
• Treat this like any other subscription attached to hardware, the same way we cost out a console and a video doorbell.
• The same question is arriving on glasses. Snap has not priced Specs Intelligence beyond its free preview, but the glasses already carry an optional data plan: Snap Specs, on paper.