The Almost-Cancellation

About six months ago I was one renewal away from cancelling Claude. Not because it got worse, because I just wasn't opening it. Rate limits I kept hitting on the rare day I did, and a Gemini 3 Pro that had just landed and felt better at almost everything I cared about: Python, JavaScript for the artistic coding side projects (a whole separate post, another day), general "what can this thing actually do" exploring.

Gemini 3 Pro earned the roughly 30 AUD a month on its own. Add the Drive storage I was already half-paying for elsewhere and the image and video generation that was genuinely solid, not a tacked-on afterthought, and the upgrade looked obvious. I downgraded Claude in my head before I'd even opened the app to do it.

Then Something Shifted

Sometime this year that stopped being true. Not Gemini getting worse, Claude getting sharply better: coding accuracy, front-end output, MCP, agent behavior, all of it improving in a way I noticed week to week instead of release to release.

I started running the same prompts through both, mostly out of curiosity at first. Then out of habit, because I kept trusting Claude's answer more often than not. Same task, same wording, and Claude's version was the one I'd actually ship.

The Downgrade

So I went the other way on Gemini. Dropped down to Google AI Plus, the cheap tier, around 15 AUD a month. I wasn't using it daily anymore, and I didn't want to keep paying full price for a tool that mostly sat there.

These days Gemini is what I open for googling instead of the traditional "googling", or for the smaller stuff I don't want eating into my Claude usage. Nothing heavy. Nothing I'd call real work.

And even at that, low-stakes level, I'm getting a lot more "I'm having a hard time fulfilling your request, can I help you with something else instead?" on requests that aren't unusual at all. Just now, checking back in to write this, I've lost access to the better model completely and landed in a flat rate limit. Not slower. Just off.

What This Actually Is

I'm not saying Gemini is bad. Six months ago I'd have written the exact opposite post about Claude, and meant it just as much. What I'm noticing is smaller and more annoying than "which one wins": 15 AUD a month bought me a tool I can poke at, not one I can actually lean on. That's not really a capability problem. That's the cheap tier telling you, politely, that you're not the priority.

Closing Thought

I didn't downgrade because Gemini got worse. I downgraded because I wasn't using it enough to justify the higher plan. But the cheap tier doesn't meet you at "occasional and light," it meets you at "barely worth keeping." Pay less and you don't just get less model, you get less patience for using it at all.