Comment by bayindirh
5 hours ago
People always love to think the AI race is a duopoly (OpenAI vs. Anthropic), but from what I have experienced, Gemini was always holding on its own, and I find myself using it more than Claude.
True, I use LLMs as glorified search engines to unearth material to read myself, but Gemini is much more useful if you decide to learn yourself. It also offers interesting expansions to your questions.
While I don't offload my work to LLMs (e.g.: Write this project, I'll be watching TV), I find them useful for closing my knowledge gap by collating information, and Google's Gemini is good at that.
Gemini is just too expensive for what you describe. Their 20$ plan only gives you access to the free tier model
I have Gemini because of my Google One membership. I already was on their 2TB plan and it gave me Pro level, IIRC, and it was generous. Now I'm on Ultra mostly because of Google Drive storage I get, but Gemini also gets a nice boost, as well.
I'm on $20 Claude plan, and it's also ample for my needs, for now.
The $20 plan gives you ~120 minutes of high thinking time from Argon weekly. Thinking time isn't an exact metric, context size matters a lot, but I have been using it on the $20 and still have 25% left with ~85 minutes of thinking time on high for a project I have been working on.
I think this is because of capacity issues. Higher paying per token users probably get preferential capacity allocations to those on monthly plans. The allowance for what you get in the monthly plan increases as the models age and the likely capacity problems improve.