Google just fired a warning shot in the AI subscription price wars

Google just made its budget AI subscription plan a lot more budget-friendly, bringing a price war that’s been brewing in emerging markets squarely to American consumers.

The company announced Monday that it is cutting the monthly price of Google AI Plus from $7.99 to $4.99 — while doubling the storage included at that tier, from 200 gigabytes to 400 gigabytes.

Vikas Kansal, product lead for Gemini AI subscriptions, said on X that the storage updates would roll out to users over the next several days.

Google AI Plus launched in January as the most affordable paid AI subscription in the U.S. market, aimed at individual users and students rather than enterprise customers. The new pricing makes that positioning even more explicit.

It has a decent feature set, too, including video generation via Omni Flash; the creative studio Google Flow; and NotebookLM, Google’s AI research assistant.

But the more interesting story here isn’t about Google’s product lineup. Subscription pricing hasn’t been a key battleground among AI providers in the U.S. until now — and that shift has serious consequences for the broader market, suggests Chi-Hua Chien, co-founder and managing partner at Goodwater Capital, a consumer-focused venture firm in the Bay Area.

Chien sees Monday’s announcement as the next salvo in what he calls the commoditization era for AI infrastructure, pointing to Google’s structural advantages — vertical integration, massive distribution, the ability to bundle — as precisely the kind of force that’s likely to erode margins for purer-play AI providers over time.

The historical parallel he reaches for is instructive. “If you look at the web era, the infrastructure companies were Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Northern Telecom, Lucent, Akamai, Equinix,” he told TechCrunch. “A lot of those companies survived for a period of time but aren’t worth a lot today.” The reason, he said, is that during every big tech shift — from PC to web to mobile — the infrastructure players get “commoditized very aggressively because the end customer doesn’t think, ‘Ooh, are my bits moving on Cisco networking equipment?’ They’re just thinking, ‘How do I move my bits as cheaply as possible?’”

None of this is a surprise to the people building foundation models. They’ve always known that raw AI capability would eventually become a commodity and that the real competition would play out at the application and distribution layer. What Chien is saying is that “eventually” is now.

“My prediction for a lot of these infrastructure companies — and when I say infrastructure, I mean an OpenAI or an Anthropic, or the back-end components, energy, chips, hosting — there will be a period of time when these companies are valuable,” he said. “But over time, you will see them get increasingly commoditized.”

It’s certainly something that a bigger pool of investors will be pondering soon. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have filed confidentially to go public, and their ability to command premium valuations may soon be tested by exactly the kind of price competition Chien is describing.

That competition has been building for nearly a year in markets like India, one of the fastest-growing AI user bases in the world. OpenAI drew first blood there in August of last year, launching ChatGPT Go at roughly $4.60 a month — a fraction of its standard $20 Plus plan. Google followed in December with a sub-$5 AI Plus plan of its own for Indian users.

Monday’s announcement suggests the same logic that drove those emerging-market moves — undercut, bundle, and capture users before rivals do — has now crossed over to the U.S. market.

Anthropic, notably, hasn’t followed. Unlike OpenAI and Google, it has yet to introduce localized pricing for India or a budget tier anywhere, a move that may become harder to avoid as its rivals keep slashing prices.