AI features used to be unlocked by which plan you were on. They are now paid for with credits, at $1 to 1,000 credits.
Buckets and a ledger
Every plan includes monthly credits: Promo 15,000 over three months, Monthly 20,000 a month, Annual 240,000 a year, and Lifetime 100,000 that do not expire. Balances sit in buckets with a ledger behind them, so every grant and every spend is recorded.
Generation is priced rather than gated: an image costs 50 credits, a video 500, captions 25. A generation that fails refunds itself automatically, and a refunded payment claws its credits back. Every balance that existed before this change was converted at one point to ten credits.
Vibe is metered
Every Gemini call in a Vibe turn, from the orchestrator and from any skill it dispatches, bills credits from the tokens it actually used, at the same $1 to 1,000 rate with a 2x margin. The session usage pill in the editor header shows real token counts and cost now instead of an estimate. Starting a turn with no credits returns a clear message telling you to add credits, rather than running the turn for free.
How you'll experience it
Your existing balance carried over. If you were on a plan that gated a feature, that gate is gone: you can run anything as long as you have the credits for it.