Two weeks after Google announced Gemini 4 Argon and handed it only to a group of cyber security teams, anyone willing to pay for the right plan can now use it. Google made Argon available on Tuesday 13th October 2026 in the Gemini app, in AI Mode in Google Search, to developers through its API and to companies through Gemini for business. Argon is what Google calls a frontier model, the term AI companies use for the most capable model they have and the one they put up against their rivals’ best.
When we first wrote about Argon on 1st October, the answer to “who can use it?” was almost nobody. Google had said paying API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers would come next, and gave no date. Yesterday’s rollout goes a step further, to Google AI Pro, the cheaper of Google’s two top plans, and both plans are sold in Kenya.
What you need to pay
In the Gemini app, Argon is for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, and Google’s Kenyan subscriptions page lists it under both.
| Plan | Price in Kenya | Gemini 4 Argon |
|---|---|---|
| Free | KES 0 | No |
| Google AI Plus | KES 900 a month | No |
| Google AI Pro | KES 3,700 a month | Yes, rolling out |
| Google AI Ultra (5 times Pro’s usage) | KES 12,500 a month | Yes |
| Google AI Ultra (20 times Pro’s usage) | KES 37,000 a month | Yes |
So the cheapest way in is AI Pro at KES 3,700 a month. The page marks Argon as “rolling out” on Pro and included on Ultra, so a Pro subscriber may not find it in the model menu straight away, although Google’s release notes say the rollout is global. For comparison, KES 3,700 is about USD 28.50, and Google lists the same plan at USD 19.99, or about KES 2,600, a month in the US.
That leaves most Gemini users here where they were. The free version of Gemini lists Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite as its model and AI Plus lists Gemini 3.6 Flash, and neither gets Argon. That matters for students, because the free year Google is offering Kenyan university and college students is AI Plus, as we found at Google’s Nairobi workshop last month.
Developers pay half price until 30th November
Developers reach Argon through the Gemini API, the connection that lets an app send text to Google’s models and get answers back. Kenya is on Google’s list of supported countries for it. Argon is only on the paid tier: the pricing page says it isn’t on the free tier, or on the AI Pro plan inside Google AI Studio, Google’s developer workbench. AI Ultra subscribers can try it in AI Studio and in Google Antigravity.
API prices are counted in tokens, the chunks of text a model reads and writes, each about three-quarters of an English word. Until 30th November 2026, Argon costs USD 2, or about KES 260, per million tokens you send it, and USD 10, or about KES 1,300, per million tokens it writes back. From 1st December, that doubles to USD 4 (about KES 520) and USD 20 (about KES 2,600). On 1st October, Google hadn’t said when the introductory price would end.
Two other gaps from our first piece have closed. Google’s model page now gives Argon a limit of 1,048,576 tokens for what it reads and writes combined, about 790,000 words, and Google has published the Argon model card, the document where it sets out a model’s tests and limits. The card puts Argon’s knowledge cutoff at March 2026, so for anything newer it has to search the web.
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