Gemini Notebook: your 50 chats a day end on Wednesday

If you use Gemini Notebook without a subscription, you know your numbers. Until yesterday Google still listed them in its help center, namely 100 notebooks, 50 sources per notebook, 500,000 words per source, plus 50 chat queries and three audio generations a day. Those fixed numbers went away on September 2. Google calls what replaced them compute-based usage limits, which means it now counts how much computing your request needs instead of how many requests you send. That allowance refills every five hours.

What eats that allowance depends on several things at once. Google names the complexity of your prompt, the model you pick, the length of the chat, the number of sources in the notebook and the features you use. A short follow-up question costs little. A video overview across 30 sources costs a lot. Google does not say how much.

Absolute numbers are missing from the announcement entirely. The help center only gives ratios against a standard allowance that Google never puts a figure on. Google AI Plus gets twice that allowance, AI Pro 4 times, and AI Ultra 5 or 20 times the Pro allowance depending on the subscription.

The weekly limit appears only in the help center

Google's announcement last Friday frames the change as more control and mentions the five-hour refill. It leaves out a second limit. The help article on usage limits says the allowance refreshes every five hours until you reach your weekly limit. You find out how high that weekly limit is when you run into it.

A second line from the Gemini Apps help center is worth a look as well, because Google reserves the right to change limits without notice, including for capacity reasons. When that happens, users without a subscription get throttled first, according to the same page.

The Gemini app already went through this

Google has done this before with its own chatbot. The Gemini app itself switched to the same model back on May 17, with the same wording in the help center. Four days later 9to5Google reported clear frustration among users, many of whom burned through their allowance faster than before. 11 days after the switch Google followed up and adjusted the limits. Notebook is going through the same thing now.

In practice, the main change for you is that you have to watch your consumption. Under Settings and Usage you can see your remaining allowance and the next refill. The chat shows a warning before things get tight, and in the studio a bar indicates the expected cost of a generation. If your allowance runs out, you can defer an output with Generate later, though only in the browser. The app does not have it.

Anyone who uses Gemini Notebook regularly for bigger research jobs should keep an eye on that display over the next few days. The old numbers are gone.