Samsung promised Galaxy AI would stay free forever. Code strings spotted by tipster site SammyGuru suggest the company is now quietly testing a way to charge for it anyway.
The evidence, reported November 9, points to a subscription tier Samsung is internally calling Galaxy AI Premium, which SammyGuru says looks close to launching into early access. Based on the code strings found, the tier would add three new capabilities: Gen Video, which generates AI videos from a user’s own photos, Bixby Action, which automates tasks across different apps, and something labeled simply Daily Briefing. On top of the new features, subscribers would also get usage limits four times higher than what’s available to everyone else on the AI tools Samsung already ships for free.
Pricing found in the code points to $4.99 a month or $47.99 a year, with early access possibly limited at first to the Galaxy S27 lineup before any wider rollout. Samsung hasn’t confirmed any of this publicly, and the company has made no official statement about a premium AI tier existing at all. That makes this report, however detailed the code strings are, still technically unconfirmed.
The promise this would walk back
Samsung has previously said that Galaxy AI features included on your phone by default will always remain free, a pledge the company has pointed to repeatedly as a differentiator against competitors who’ve been slower to roll AI into their default phone experience. Nineteen specific features fall under that promise as Samsung has listed them: Live Translate, Note Assist, Zoom Nightography, Writing Assist, Chat Assist, Drawing Assist, AI Select, Now Brief, Now Bar, Audio Eraser, Photo Assist, AI Enhanced Wallpaper, Browsing Assist, Voice Recorder, Transcript Assist, Health Assist, Auto Zoom, Auto Framing, and Suggested Replies.
Crucially, none of those nineteen features appear to be what’s moving behind a paywall here. The tools reportedly staying free, just with usage caps, include Browsing Assist, Now Brief, Creative Studio, Smart Capture, the Samsung Keyboard’s AI functions, Photo Assist, and Personal Agent. What’s actually being monetized are newer capabilities that didn’t exist when Samsung made its original free-forever pledge, plus higher usage ceilings on tools that were previously uncapped or loosely capped. That’s a meaningfully different story than Samsung breaking its word outright, but it’s also exactly the kind of structure a company uses to honor the letter of an old promise while building a business model around everything that promise didn’t cover.
Reaction has been predictably rough
Early discussion threads on Reddit responding to the report were blunt, with comments like “dead on arrival” and “ewwww, no thanks” showing up quickly, though a handful of reactions on one forum thread obviously don’t represent how hundreds of millions of Galaxy owners will actually feel once, or if, this ships. Samsung users have gotten used to AI features arriving for free as a selling point of buying Samsung hardware in the first place, so any paywall, even one that’s technically additive rather than a bait-and-switch on existing features, is going to generate friction.
Why “additive” paywalls are the industry playbook
There’s a reason every major AI company is converging on the same structure: free access to a baseline set of tools, with new or more intensive capabilities reserved for paying subscribers. Running inference on large AI models costs real money per request, and the more a feature does, generating a video, running an agent across multiple apps, the more compute it burns through. A company that promised everything would stay free forever was always making a promise it could only keep if the scope of “everything” never grew. Samsung’s original nineteen features were defined at a specific point in time, and the company’s apparent strategy is to honor that specific list while treating anything invented afterward as fair game for monetization.
That’s a defensible position from a pure business logic standpoint, but it puts Samsung in an awkward communications spot. Marketing a phone around “AI features that are always free” and then introducing a premium AI tier, even one that technically respects the original list, invites exactly the kind of “bait and switch” framing that’s already showing up in early reactions. Samsung will need to be very precise in how it communicates this if and when it becomes official, or risk a bigger backlash than the actual product change probably warrants.
Samsung wouldn’t be first, or even unusual
The pattern here isn’t isolated to Samsung. Apple has reportedly signaled that its own Siri AI overhaul will come with usage limits for at least some users, and OpenAI has had to manage shared ChatGPT usage limits that frustrate its free and even some paying users during high-demand periods. Google, too, has been pulling free and Plus-tier users away from some of its more capable Gemini models, pushing heavier usage toward paid tiers. Every major AI player built out free-to-use assistants as a land grab over the past two years, and every one of them is now facing the same math problem: inference is expensive, and land grabs eventually need a revenue model attached to them.
That context matters because it reframes what Samsung is reportedly doing here from “breaking a promise” to “catching up to an industry-wide pattern.” It doesn’t make the pivot less annoying for users who bought a phone partly on the strength of that free-forever pledge, but it does suggest this was always the likely endpoint once the initial AI feature rollout matured past its honeymoon phase. It’s the same tension playing out across wearable AI hardware like Aina’s new smart ring, where the business model for keeping an AI assistant running has to land somewhere eventually, usually on the user’s monthly bill.
The bottom line
Nothing here is official yet, this is based on code strings, not a Samsung press release, so treat the specific pricing and feature list as a strong leak rather than confirmed fact. But the direction is clear enough: free AI features were always a loss-leader strategy to get people using the tools, and every company that ran that playbook is now building the paywall behind it. If you bought into Samsung’s free-forever framing, the fine print was always “the features that exist today,” not “every AI feature we ever ship.”
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