Google is doubling down on its plan to make you pay for the privilege of being locked into its ecosystem, announcing that its AI subscriptions now include premium Colab cloud computing perks starting at $4.99 a month — while users who break free from Google's app suite report faster devices, less tracking, and freedom from AI clutter they never asked for.

The stake is straightforward: every perk Google bundles into its subscription is another hook keeping you inside a platform that tracks your browsing, funnels AI prompts into your inbox, and controls what information surfaces when you search. The five dollars a month isn't the real cost. The real cost is handing an institution already credibly accused of manipulating search results and censoring dissent another layer of dependency.

Android Authority reported that Google's AI subscriptions now include access to premium Google Colab perks — a browser-based cloud platform offering computing resources like GPUs and TPUs. Standalone Colab subscriptions run $9.99 and $49.99 per month for Pro and Pro+, respectively. By folding those benefits into AI plans starting at $4.99, Google is making the subscription harder to drop. AI Ultra subscribers get even more: uninterrupted background execution and premium GPU access. Existing Colab subscribers can stack benefits. The perks are rolling out to Colab-supported countries now and may take weeks to appear.

Android Authority framed this straightforwardly as a consumer value play — more benefits, same price. What went unmentioned: every added perk is another reason not to leave, and another data stream flowing into Google's infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Android Police ran a very different kind of story. A longtime Samsung Galaxy user reported that uninstalling duplicate Google apps — Chrome, Gmail, Google Keep, Gboard — made his device noticeably faster and more productive. The reasons are instructive. Samsung Browser, he wrote, offers "granular control over anti-tracking, letting me curb trackers selectively or block them entirely" — something Chrome, Google's own product, doesn't prioritize. Without "invasive trackers and background data collection," the browser runs more efficiently, especially on hardware with constrained RAM.

On email, he ditched Gmail for Samsung Email because it remains "free from the aggressive Gemini and AI prompts creeping into my inbox." Google isn't just offering AI — it's forcing it into corners of your digital life whether you want it or not.

Android Police framed this as a personal productivity story. Buried in it was the more important truth: Google's apps are designed to keep you in Google's ecosystem, collect your data, and push AI features you didn't request. The author noted that reducing reliance on Google apps let him "break free from the broader Google ecosystem with far less friction."

Put the two stories together and the picture sharpens. Google is making it cheaper and easier to stay inside its walls while making the walls higher. Colab perks at $4.99 are a bargain on paper. But every subscription dollar also buys deeper entrenchment in a platform that tracks your browsing, injects AI into your email, and controls the information pipeline hundreds of millions of Americans rely on daily.

The question isn't whether $4.99 is a fair price for cloud computing. It's whether any price is worth trading autonomy for convenience inside a system that has repeatedly demonstrated it can't be trusted to stay neutral.