- The Google One (2TB) subscription is losing two big features in the UK
- Subscribers will soon have to pay for Google Home Premium separately
- Fitbit Premium will also disappear from the subscription on October 1, 2026
Google Home is getting a big Gemini-powered upgrade, but that change isn’t coming without a few casualties and price hikes.
Early Gemini for Home testers (those who signed up for early access) are now getting the new features, but Google has given me some slightly worse news. As a Google One subscriber in the UK, I currently get Google Home Premium and Fitbit Premium as part of my subscription, but not for long.
In an email sent to me and other Google One subscribers (below), Google says that “these benefits will no longer be offered with your Premium plan effective October 1, 2026”. This means that to keep the existing benefits for my Nest Cam (let alone get all the Gemini-powered benefits coming soon), I’ll soon need to upgrade to a much pricier Google AI Pro plan.
To convince me and others in the UK to put down our pitchforks, Google has offered us a cut-price AI Pro deal for the next year. We can get 50% off for the next 12 months, taking its price down from £18.99 per month (it’s currently $19.99 / AU$32.99 per month in the US and Australia) to £9.49 a month.
Unfortunately, that’s still considerably more than my current £79.99 a year (which works out as £6.67 a month). And after that discounted first year, the subscription will be almost three times what I currently pay.
As someone who recently started a YouTube Premium subscription, that’s tough to swallow (and frankly, justify). As I live in the UK, I also won’t get any Gemini for Home camera features until early 2026 anyway. So the clock is ticking on my Nest Cam’s useful extended video history and ‘familiar faces’ powers, and I’ll likely soon be looking for a subscription-free alternative instead.
The final smart home straw
As my colleague Lance Ulanoff (TechRadar’s Editor at Large) wrote recently, tech subscriptions are becoming a major bugbear. I’m pretty tired of them, but it’s particularly bad in the smart home.
Buying smart home tech in the last decade has felt like playing a constant game of bait-and-switch, followed by the sting of price gouging. Most smart home devices I’ve owned (from Tado to Canary and more) have switched to a subscription policy that wasn’t there from the outset.
I don’t have a problem with subscriptions that provide add-on value, but they shouldn’t be used to ring-fence basic functionality. My Nest Cam, for example, is largely useless without a subscription because you only get the last three hours of recordings in your event history.
Combine this with the fact that Google isn’t launching its new 3rd Nest Doorbell in the UK – and is even restricting the fun colors for its incoming Home Speaker to the US – and I’m starting to feel like a very unwelcome guest in Google’s smart home.
In fact, I may well retire from Google hardware in general, given its tendency to abruptly kick projects into the Google graveyard whenever it gets distracted by the next shiny innovation.
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mark.wilson@futurenet.com (Mark Wilson)
