Google has introduced new cost-management and pricing options for Gemini Enterprise on Google Cloud as enterprise AI usage accelerates and the industry confronts "AI sticker shock." The pay-as-you-go option removes fixed subscription commitments, lets businesses set monthly project-level spending limits and automatically pauses AI-agent calls when budgets are exhausted. Customers that commit to longer-term use can receive discounts of 10% to 20%, while scheduling some workloads during off-peak periods can deliver discounts of up to 50%. Spend Caps alert users at 50%, 80% and 100% of their budgets before services are paused, while the AI Cost Summary Agent analyzes spending patterns and flags anomalies. The tools accompany a 17% reduction in output-token pricing for Gemini 3.6 Flash as of July 2026 and a June cut in the AI Plus subscription from $7.99 to $4.99 per month, alongside a storage increase to 400GB. CEO Sundar Pichai said businesses processing about 1 trillion tokens a day could save more than $1B annually by moving 80% of workloads to cheaper Flash models. Google reports that token consumption has increased sevenfold year-over-year to approximately 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month across its platform. The company says the measures are intended to lower the barrier for enterprise AI trials and expand the market while it continues developing frontier AI models and competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. Those rivals are also developing similar cost-management tools.