Gemini Notebook: your 50 chats a day end on Wednesday

If you use Gemini Notebook without a subscription, you know your numbers. Google still lists them in its help center today, 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 disappear on September 2 and give way to a compute budget that refills every five hours.

What eats that budget 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 thirty sources costs a lot. How much exactly, Google does not say.

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 four times, and AI Ultra five or twenty 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. How high that weekly limit sits, you find out 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 knows this move from 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. Eleven days after the switch Google followed up and adjusted the limits. Notebook is now walking the same lap.

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 budget runs out, you can push an output to later 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 still in the help center today. Tomorrow they are history.