I understand why would would move Pro variant behind paywall, you don’t get many uses of it anymore on free tier. But moving the Flash version behind paywall is kinda crazy.

Did we forget what Flash was meant for? I have tried Flash-lite, in my tests, almost all the recent models we have today are good and enough for most daily tasks.

Flash-lite is one of the few models available that is easy to notice its flaws. Its good to summarize data (for example search results), that’s it.

"Daily tasks" is still a bit vague of description. Based on my experience, even Flash could sometime make mistakes including something as obvious as simple arithmetic (kinda daily task if you do shopping/counting etc), or when the question is not defined enough.

I had some fond time using Flash, asking "what's what" questions against objects I found in nature etc. The answers I got were fine, so it was benefiting to use, but I don't think I'll pay for that, it's still not "assistant" level helpful.

The "Flash" branding is doing a disservice here, it makes it sound like the cheap and bad model, but 3.8 Flash is really quite good, especially for it's price.

Flash-Lite is closer to what Flash originally was, both in terms of the pricing and the intelligence level compared to other models in the same generation.

Have you see the price for Flash? Keeps going up. Flash 2.5 was a sweet spot.