Few things in life are ever really free, and smartphone brands are eager to start monetizing those expensive AI investments that they hope are encouraging you to upgrade. If you thought premium phones are expensive now, you haven’t seen anything yet.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the crafty ways to squeeze extra cash from us are already here; Google has linked Gemini Advanced to its priciest Google One plan. Rumors abound that Apple is considering something similar (once Apple Intelligence is actually in a usable state). If some reports are to be believed, it might try to charge up to $20 per month for advanced AI tools. Likewise, Samsung plans to monetize Galaxy AI at the end of 2025, though it’s currently mulling over exactly what this will look like.
Mobile has been spoilt with free AI tools, but the pricing clampdown is coming.
AI subscriptions are nothing new, of course. The latest ChatGPT models and some of the industry’s best image-generation platforms are locked behind paywalls. There’s nothing wrong with paying for a quality service. But for mobile, we’ve been spoilt by freebies for a couple of years, especially with image and video editing, but the inevitable sting in the wallet is coming.
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
I think I’ve seen what this future will look like for smartphones, having stumbled across an “AI cloud service quota” on the new ASUS Zenfone 12 Ultra. Now, I want to make it clear that ASUS hasn’t paywalled its AI features. If you hit the quota, you can’t actually pay for more, so it’s more about preventing abuse. Unfortunately, the service went down in the midst of my attempt to hit the limit, so I have no idea exactly how generous it is. I suppose dodgy servers and long queue times are just a symptom of “free” tools — though it’s still a bad look for a premium smartphone.
Regardless, there’s a finite pool of AI resources out there, and phone brands won’t keep picking up the tab forever. Usage quotas are the most likely avenue for a mobile industry keen to bring in more cash in light of tight hardware profits. After all, the freemium model is a well-tested method that gets us hooked. “Oh no, you’ve run out of that thing you were enjoying; here’s a button to buy more of it…” OpenAI enjoys success with this method, teasing users with a sample of the fancy GPT-4o before slapping cheapskates like me down to 4o-mini.
Long wait times and quotas could be used to push us towards AI subscriptions.
We might be OK with this for text tasks — a summary is a summary, after all. But it’ll be much bleaker if we end up with strict quotas for object erasing or generative edits. These features are so often baked into gallery apps that we probably all open every day, and it already irks me to be pestered about storage upgrades in Photos. Lord help us when other apps start banging on about the AI subscription features we’re “missing out on.”
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
Unfortunately, multimedia processing is much more computationally expensive than text, so it is the more likely candidate for limited quotas. We’re not far off that point already; there’s often a slow queue for Google’s Video Boost, and the wait times will only increase as more Pixels fly off store shelves. I wonder how it will be before users can pay to skip the queue.
This depressing prospect is one of the reasons why offline AI options are so important — they can’t take our toys away if they’re not on their servers. Unfortunately, local processing isn’t brilliant on smartphones just yet. See the dubious state of Samsung’s on-device Audio Eraser, for example. But all hope isn’t lost; high-end handsets can already run smaller text models, and it’ll just be a matter of time until they’re capable of crunching image gen, editing, and other tools on their increasingly powerful NPUs and GPUs. We just have to hold out against the subscriptions and keep demanding that companies focus on offline AI tools instead of less secure, less ecological, and less dependable cloud AI infrastructure.
