Happy Tuesday everybody!
Quick question.
Still paying $20/month for ChatGPT Plus?
Google is quietly giving away something nearly as good, for free.
One thing before we get into it.
Which would help you most in the next month?
Stop switching apps. Your browser can do it all.
Every tab you open, every copy-paste into ChatGPT, every lost train of thought — that's your browser failing you. Norton Neo fixes it. Built-in AI works directly inside your session. Hover to preview. Search everything from one bar. VPN and ad blocking included, free.
Pick Of The Week - Google AI Studio
Google AI Studio is a free web tool that gives you direct access to Google's most powerful Gemini model, the same one businesses pay for through the API.
No signup tricks. No credit card. No waitlist.
Just open a browser tab.
The savings
Most people default to ChatGPT Plus.
$20 a month. $240 a year.
For access to OpenAI's top model.
AI Studio gives you similar-level access to Google's top model, for $0.
Same kind of tool. Same kind of reasoning. Zero cost.
Where it actually beats the paid tools
Here's the part nobody talks about.
AI Studio can handle enormous documents.
You can paste in:
a 1,000-page PDF
an entire textbook
20 research papers at once
a full codebase
And it can reason across all of it in one conversation.
ChatGPT Plus can't do that. Claude struggles at that size too.
For long documents, AI Studio is genuinely one of the most powerful free AI tools on the internet right now.
What you'd actually use it for
Summarise a whole book in one pass
Upload a long PDF and ask questions about it
Drop in a messy transcript and pull out key quotes
Paste a course's reading list and get a study guide
Feed it a full codebase and ask how it works
Translate long documents in one shot
Plus, you can use some of Google’s most advanced models!
A quick note for students
If you're in college, this is the one to bookmark.
Upload your entire textbook, ask questions like you're talking to a tutor
Drop in 10 research papers, get a synthesis
Paste a lecture transcript, get structured notes
It handles the document sizes that ChatGPT and Claude tap out on.
And it costs nothing.
My take
Most people are paying monthly for AI without realising Google gives away something nearly as good. For long documents specifically, it's actually better. If you try one thing this week, make it this.
Catch you next week,
Max