Tools · · 2 min read

Gemini CLI shut down on June 18 — and the free tier that replaced it is ~98% smaller

Google's open-source Gemini CLI stopped serving requests on June 18, 2026 for free, Pro, and Ultra users, replaced by the closed-source Antigravity CLI. The free tier drops from 1,000 requests per day to roughly 20 per week, and CI/CD pipelines calling the gemini command broke. Here's what builders relying on it should do now.

Google’s Gemini CLI stopped serving requests on June 18, 2026 for free, Google AI Pro, and Ultra users, completing a forced migration to the new, closed-source Antigravity CLI. (Source: Google Developers Blog transition notice) If you have the gemini command anywhere in a CI pipeline, cron job, or shell script, it broke that day — and the free tier you migrate to is a fraction of what you had.

Key facts:

  • Gemini CLI stopped serving requests on June 18, 2026 for free, Pro, and Ultra tiers, plus individual Gemini Code Assist subscribers. (Source: Google Developers Blog)
  • Only Enterprise Gemini Code Assist license holders keep access after that date.
  • The old free tier was 60 requests per minute and 1,000 requests per day on a personal Google account. (Source: google-gemini/gemini-cli GitHub discussion #4122)
  • Antigravity CLI’s free tier is reported at roughly 20 requests, resetting weekly — a ~98% cut, and a daily reset became a weekly one. (Source: TechTimes, 2026-06-18)
  • Antigravity CLI is closed-source; its public GitHub repo holds only a changelog, a readme, and a GIF — no application code. Gemini CLI was Apache-2.0 with ~105,000 stars and ~6,000 merged community PRs. (Source: The New Stack; The Register)
Google's official banner announcing the transition from Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI
Google's official migration banner. The transition was announced at I/O on May 19, 2026, with a ~30-day window before the June 18 cutoff. (Source: Google Developers Blog)

What actually changed

This is the cutover we flagged back in May when Antigravity 2.0 auto-updated and gutted the IDE — except now the deadline has passed and the consequences are concrete.

Three things hit builders at once. First, the command surface changed: Antigravity CLI is a new Go-based binary, not a rebranded gemini. Google itself says there is no 1:1 feature parity at launch. (Source: Google Developers Blog) Anything that shells out to gemini returns nothing now. Second, an MCP config change silently breaks CI — pipelines that loaded MCP servers the old way fail without an obvious error. (Source: The New Stack) Third, the free-tier economics collapsed: developers on the Antigravity issues tracker report exhausting the weekly quota in a handful of prompts, where Gemini CLI gave 1,000 requests every day. (Source: TechTimes, 2026-06-18)

The open-source angle is the part that stings. Gemini CLI was Apache-2.0 and community-built. Contributors who signed the CLA are calling the closed-source successor a “bait-and-switch” — the labor was absorbed into an enterprise product with no source code shipped back. (Source: The Register; The New Stack)

What it means if you’re building

The immediate task is an audit. Grep your repos, CI configs, cron tabs, and editor hooks for the gemini command. Every hit is now dead and needs to either move to the antigravity binary or be repointed.

For unattended automation, the free tier is no longer viable. Roughly 20 requests a week won’t run a nightly job, let alone a CI step on every push. If you relied on free Gemini CLI for scripted work, budget for a paid tier or move that workload to another agent — the same kind of swap you’d make to evaluate Claude Code as a daily driver or to weigh Claude Code against Codex.

If open source was load-bearing for you — air-gapped builds, auditability, no telemetry — Antigravity CLI does not meet that bar anymore. Practical alternatives keep a fork of the Apache-2.0 Gemini CLI, or run a coding agent over a model endpoint you control, including self-hosted open-weights coding models. The durable lesson is the same one this migration just taught the hard way: keep the model and the harness config-driven, so the next forced cutover is a config change, not a rewrite. The hosted Gemini 3.5 Flash API is unaffected — this shutdown is about the CLI tooling, not the models.

Sources

Source: Google Developers Blog