--- title: Google shuts down Jules, the cloud coding agent with a free plan canonical: https://thebeat.dev/deep-dives/2026-11-06-google-shuts-down-jules/ published: 2026-11-06 tags: - ai-coding-agents - pricing - positioning collection: deep-dives site: https://thebeat.dev/ license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ --- # Google shuts down Jules, the cloud coding agent with a free plan > As far as we can find, Jules was the only cloud coding agent from a big company you could use without paying. Five days after Google announced its end, Antigravity started rolling out cloud agents, but only on paid personal plans. Jules gave every developer 15 cloud tasks a day for free. Google gave its users 13 days to finish their work, pointed them to a rival's agent for the export, and five days later brought the idea back inside Antigravity, for paid personal plans only. ## What happened On 29 October, Google said it's shutting down Jules. Jules is Google's coding agent that works in the background. You give it a task on a GitHub repository, it works on a machine in Google's cloud, and it comes back with a pull request. You don't have to keep your laptop open while it works. The [notice](https://jules.google/docs/changelog/) gave users until 11 November to finish their work. After that, Jules goes read-only, and it shuts down for good at the end of the year. So users had 13 days of real use left, not two months. As we write this, that's five. [We covered the notice briefly last week](/issues/2026-W44). This piece goes further, because the story turned out to be bigger than one product. Three things make it worth the long read. First, what Google closed. In recent months, the big rivals all made the cloud agent a normal part of their paid plans. But as far as we can find, none of them offers one for free. Jules did, with 15 tasks a day. Second, what Google did next. Last week we wrote that Antigravity, Google's newer coding app, couldn't run agents in the cloud yet. Five days after the notice, it started to. But only for people who pay for a personal plan. Third, the way out. Google's own export guide names Claude Code, a rival's agent, as the tool to get your data out with. If you sell a devtools product, the first point is the one to keep in mind. A free plan is often how developers find a tool before their company buys it. And a cloud agent is the expensive thing to give away, because every task runs on a machine someone pays for. Let's start at the beginning. ## What Jules promised Google first showed Jules in December 2024, to a small group of testers. The pitch came down to one word, asynchronous: > Working asynchronously and integrated with your GitHub workflow, Jules handles bug fixes and other time-consuming tasks while you focus on what you actually want to build. That's from [Google's developer blog](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/the-next-chapter-of-the-gemini-era-for-developers/). So what's an asynchronous agent? It's the difference between working with someone and handing them a job. Most of the time, a coding tool works while you watch. You read what it does and you steer. An asynchronous agent takes the task away. It sets up its own machine, installs what your project needs, writes the code, runs the tests and opens a pull request. You check in later. Jules opened to everyone as a [free public beta](https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/jules/) at Google I/O in May 2025. In August it left beta, and Google said it had [passed 140,000 public commits](https://jules.google/docs/changelog/) in two months. That's the last usage number we could find from Google. August also brought paid plans. The free plan kept going, at 15 tasks a day. The [paid plans](https://jules.google/docs/usage-limits/) came with Google's AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions, at 100 and 300 tasks a day. As far as we can tell, they were only ever sold to personal Gmail accounts. There was no plan for companies. On launch day, Kathy Korevec, the Google Labs product director behind Jules, gave [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/googles-ai-coding-agent-jules-is-now-out-of-beta/) the line that reads badly now: > The trajectory of where we're going gives us a lot of confidence that Jules is around and going to be around for the long haul. For a while, it looked that way. Over the next seven months, the [changelog](https://jules.google/docs/changelog/) filled up. Jules learned to remember your preferences between tasks. It got a command-line tool and an API in October 2025. It learned to run on a schedule, reply to comments on its pull requests and fix a failing build. By February it could connect to tools like Linear and Supabase. ## The quiet before the notice The last new feature in Jules's changelog is dated 9 March 2026. It's a model upgrade. After that, there's no new entry for seven and a half months, until the shutdown notice. We think the reason came out in May. At I/O 2026, Google relaunched Antigravity as a standalone app and [wrote](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/google-io-2026-all-our-announcements/): "We are unifying on Antigravity as the only platform you need for agent-first development." Jules isn't mentioned once in that list of a hundred announcements. Antigravity needs its own introduction. Google [launched it](https://antigravity.google/blog/introducing-google-antigravity) in November 2025 as a place to build software with agents. Four months earlier, Google had done a deal with Windsurf, a coding startup. It paid [about $2.4 billion](https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021763/google-snatches-windsurf-execs-in-a-2-4b-deal.html) to license Windsurf's technology, and it hired the CEO, Varun Mohan, into Google DeepMind. The price comes from press reports, not from Google. So by this year, Google had two coding agents, built by two different groups. Jules came from Google Labs, the experiments group. Antigravity grew out of Google DeepMind, where the Windsurf team landed. And Antigravity had the numbers. In July, Sundar Pichai told investors it had ["more than 2.4 million weekly active users"](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/). There's one more sign of the quiet. In October 2025, GitHub announced [Agent HQ](https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/welcome-home-agents/), a way to hand a GitHub issue to another company's agent. The launch post quoted Korevec: "With Agent HQ, Jules becomes a native assignee, streamlining manual steps and reducing friction in everyday development." A year later, GitHub's [docs](https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/about-third-party-agents) list two outside agents, Claude and Codex. Jules isn't one of them. We couldn't find either company saying why. Jules also wasn't the first product folded into Antigravity this year. Here's the list so far: - **Firebase Studio**, Google's app builder in the browser: [sunset announced in March](https://firebase.google.com/docs/studio/migrating-project), with a year until its data is deleted. Users are pointed to Antigravity and AI Studio. - **Gemini CLI**, Google's coding agent for the terminal: retired for individual users [in June](https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transitioning-gemini-cli-to-antigravity-cli/), with 30 days' notice. Google said it was "unifying our efforts into Google Antigravity". - **Jules**: 13 days until read-only. Each notice uses nearly the same words: unify, learnings, lessons. Users felt the quiet. [One early user wrote](https://x.com/RayLin_AI/status/2115965717166379481) under Google's shutdown post that "ever since Gemini 3 launched, it's barely received any updates and has been pretty much left to die for almost a year." That's harsher than the changelog, which kept shipping features until March. But the seven silent months after that are real. ## How the exit works Here's what a Jules user has to do before 11 November. Your code is safe. It's already in GitHub, with your branches and pull requests. What lives only in Jules is what Jules learned about your work. That means the setup scripts that prepare its machine, your environment variables, your scheduled tasks, its memories of how you like things done and the history of every session. Google [offers an export](https://jules.google/docs/changelog/) for all of it. The export is where it gets odd. Google tells you to install the Jules command-line tool and sign in. Then you "open a CLI coding agent, such as Claude Code" and paste in a long prompt Google wrote. Antigravity's own command-line tool isn't mentioned. So the official way out of a Google product names a rival's agent. We think the simple explanation is the right one: the people who wrote the export used the tool they use every day. That tells you something about where the market is. And the export isn't a feature Jules ever had. The prompt has the agent call Google's internal endpoints, not Jules's public API. The prompt says so itself: > Both are undocumented, so if a call starts returning 404/400, tell me which one rather than guessing at fixes. In other words, the official export is a scrape. If you run it, check the count of errors at the end. [One user found](https://x.com/Alexcyzhou/status/2116021543801434473) it skips any session it fails to fetch. One file in it deserves your attention. The export saves your environment variables with their values, in env-variables.json. Those are often API keys and passwords. Google tells you to keep the folder private and out of your repositories. Do that. One Hacker News commenter read the whole notice as a thank-you note for data: ["Thank you for donating your .env, trade secrets and your source code to us to improve Google Antigravity."](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294640) Some things the notice doesn't say at all: - **When your data is deleted.** There's no date. - **What happens to scheduled tasks** after 11 November, or to the GitHub label that hands an issue to Jules. - **Anything about money.** Jules was a listed benefit of AI Pro and Ultra. The notice mentions no refund or discount. Google's own help pages haven't caught up, either. The English help page for AI Pro [no longer mentions Jules](https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406?hl=en). The Spanish version of the same page [still lists](https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406?hl=es) "Jules con límites más altos" as something you get when you subscribe. So did all 27 other languages we tried. It looks like only the English page was updated. ## Everyone else charges for it Now step back and look at the market. In recent months, the big rivals made the cloud agent a normal part of a paid plan: - **Amazon:** Kiro's cloud sessions [became generally available](https://kiro.dev/blog/agentic-engineering-in-the-cloud/) on 3 September, on its paid plans, with "no separate charge for cloud compute". - **Anthropic:** Claude Code [runs cloud sessions](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/claude-code-on-the-web) on its Pro plan and up. Its docs say there's "no separate charge for the cloud VM". - **OpenAI:** Codex in the cloud [comes with ChatGPT Plus and up](https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/pricing). Cloud tasks draw on the same allowance as work on your own machine. - **GitHub:** the new version of Copilot's cloud agent [opened to paid plans](https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/coding-agent/about-coding-agent) on 28 October, the day before the Jules notice. - **Cursor:** its cloud agents, which it used to call background agents, [come with](https://cursor.com/docs/cloud-agent) its Premium plan and up. Its Free and Plus plans don't include them. Look at how they price it. Most of them have stopped selling cloud tasks one at a time. A cloud task uses up part of the plan's allowance, like any other work. GitHub counts the machine time separately, and Cursor asks you to set a spending limit. And not one of the five puts it on a free plan. People are using it, too. GitHub's [Octoverse report](https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-commits-pushes-reach-new-highs-in-2026-as-developers-build-with-agents/), published on 28 October, says that by September more than 40% of pull requests on GitHub started as an agent's first draft. In March it was 17%. GitHub only counts the agents it can detect, so the real share is probably higher. So where did Jules stand? It was small. PRarena, a public tracker that counts agent pull requests on GitHub, gives Jules [about 247,000](https://github.com/aavetis/PRarena) since launch. That's about 2% of all the pull requests from the six agents it tracks. Codex alone has more than eight million. (PRarena doesn't track Claude Code at all.) Its work also got merged less often. On another tracker, [Amplifying](https://amplifying.ai/coding-agents.md), about six in ten of Jules's pull requests got merged, lower than Codex, Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot. But small isn't the same as dead. We counted the pull requests Jules's bot opened on public GitHub each month. From August to October it opened between 10,400 and 11,500 a month. Even the week after the notice, it was still opening as many as in a normal week in September. So Google didn't close a product nobody used. It closed a small, steady one that was free, in the part of the market where everyone else charges. ## Five days later, Antigravity got cloud agents On 3 November, Antigravity's [changelog](https://antigravity.google/docs/changelog) said "remote agents, which run conversations in the cloud, are starting to roll out." A few days earlier, TestingCatalog had [spotted a local-or-cloud switch](https://www.testingcatalog.com/cloud-execution-is-coming-to-antigravity-soon/) in the latest build, and Varun Mohan had teased a big week on X. On 6 November, Antigravity's account [posted the pitch](https://x.com/antigravity/status/2118530564428833010): > Fire off a task, step away for coffee, unblock permissions from your phone, and come back to passed tests and a clean pull request. That's close to the Jules pitch. It also answers the biggest worry in the replies to Google's shutdown post. Users were afraid that Antigravity would mean keeping an app open on their laptop. ["the best part of jules was closing the laptop and waking up to a PR,"](https://x.com/GravityRsch/status/2115896879313809507) one wrote. "if folding it into antigravity means keeping an IDE tab alive, it defeats the point." Google's answer came within a week. Here's the catch. The [Remote Agents docs](https://antigravity.google/docs/remote-agents/) say it's rolling out gradually to personal AI Pro and Ultra accounts, and then: > It isn't available on the free plan, on Google AI Plus, or for business accounts (Google Workspace or Google Cloud). AI Pro costs [$19.99 a month](https://one.google.com/about/google-ai-plans/). Put that next to Jules. Jules had a free plan with 15 tasks a day. Free users now have no way into Antigravity's cloud agents. Anyone on Google AI Plus, the cheaper plan, is out too. So is anyone who signs in with a work account. The new product is also missing a lot, for now. We read the Remote Agents docs looking for the Jules features people relied on. The docs don't mention seven of them: setup scripts, environment variables, memories, the GitHub label, replies to pull request comments, build fixes and an API. Some of them may exist without docs. And the docs don't describe any way to import a Jules export. So a Jules user who moves over starts from scratch. The limits got vaguer too. Jules promised a number: 15, 100 or 300 tasks a day. Antigravity's [plans page](https://antigravity.google/docs/plans) promises AI Pro "a high, generous quota, refreshed every five hours until the weekly limit is reached." It doesn't say how many tasks that is. And one detail is worth knowing before you try it. By default, remote agents run every command without asking you first. The docs call this setting "always-proceed (turbo)". That's common for a machine in the cloud, because it can't touch your laptop. But check it before you hand it a repository that holds secrets. ## What users are actually doing The public reaction was small. On Hacker News, five separate posts about the shutdown got [20 points between them](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294605). The most-liked reply we could read under Google's post on X was a joke: ["could've just emailed the 3 people this affects."](https://x.com/kodahhhhh/status/2115885841935724605) But the people who used Jules used it a lot. "I must have done over 400 PRs with it or more," [one wrote](https://x.com/JordanScarrott5/status/2115900353468407942). Another said Jules was ["90% of the reason I signed up for AI pro."](https://x.com/_InYOB_/status/2115885396110541310) What they're doing next is the interesting part. From what we could find, most of them aren't moving to another hosted agent, at least not yet. They're moving what Jules knew into files they own. It goes like this. Jules's memories and setup notes go into AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md. Those are plain text files in the repository, and most coding agents read one of them when they start. Scheduled tasks go into cron jobs or GitHub Actions. The code stays where it always was. [One developer](https://dev.to/piekwerk/googles-jules-shuts-down-december-31-7-days-left-to-export-your-coding-agents-memories-and-setup-5oi) put it in two sentences: "The code outlives the agent. The context does not." You can watch this happen on GitHub, in issues like ["Remove Jules integration after Nov 11 shutdown"](https://github.com/arii/remote-server/issues/102) and [one that ends](https://github.com/Ciemaar/campaign_logger/issues/155) "decide the dispatch replacement". In one repository, the pull request that archives the Jules history before the shutdown [says it was](https://github.com/linuxmalaysia/all-my-notes-as-linux-sysadmin/pull/41) "created automatically by Jules." Its owner asked Jules to write up its own history, and it did. The big rivals stayed quiet. We found no public offer to Jules users from any of them, though we couldn't search every post on X. A couple of small startups, [Paradev](https://paradev.com/compare/jules-alternative) among them, did update their "Jules alternatives" pages on 5 November. ## Our take Our take: Google kept the cloud agent and dropped the free one. That's the part that matters. The best case for Google is strong, and it's about money. Every cloud task runs on a machine Google pays for. A free plan with 15 of those a day is expensive to give away, and none of the big rivals does it. Even a Hacker News user who liked Jules's scheduled runs [said](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298309): "I can't imagine this was at all economically feasible." Jules was small, and on Amplifying's count its work got merged less often than Codex's, Claude Code's, Cursor's or Copilot's. Google had too many coding products, and it's cutting them down to one. Seen that way, Google just did what the rest of the market already does: it charges for the cloud agent. Here's what that leaves out. First, the free plan was the one thing Jules had that nobody else did. A developer who tries an agent for free on a side project is the developer who asks for it at work. Google had that door to itself, and it closed it. Second, companies. As far as we can tell, Jules was never sold to them, and Remote Agents isn't either. Every rival on our list sells its cloud agent to teams. So Google now charges like its rivals, but sells to fewer people than they do. Third, trust. Thirteen days is short for something people built habits and scheduled jobs around, even with the read-only weeks after it. Gemini CLI users got 30 days. Amazon gave Q Developer users twelve months before [support ends](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/amazon-q-developer-end-of-support-announcement/). And Jules is the third coding product this year that Google has folded into Antigravity, after Firebase Studio and Gemini CLI. Each time, people who built on it have to redo their setup. In the end, Jules lost inside Google before it lost anywhere else. Antigravity had the user number Pichai gave investors, the team from a $2.4 billion deal and the I/O line about unifying. Jules had a changelog that went quiet in March. ## What to watch On 11 November, Jules goes read-only. On 31 December, it shuts down. Watch whether Google says anything before then about refunds, or about when it deletes the data it holds, environment variables included. And watch who gets remote agents. If they reach the free plan or work accounts, Google is back in the race for new developers. If they stay behind AI Pro, Google has chosen to sell the cloud agent as a perk for people who already pay. ## Sources - [Jules - Changelog (Jules Turndown, October 29, 2026)](https://jules.google/docs/changelog/) - [Jules on X - the shutdown post](https://x.com/julesagent/status/2115883717705261283) - [Jules docs - Limits and plans](https://jules.google/docs/usage-limits/) - [Google Developers Blog - The next chapter of the Gemini era for developers (December 2024)](https://developers.googleblog.com/en/the-next-chapter-of-the-gemini-era-for-developers/) - [Google - Build with Jules, your asynchronous coding agent (May 2025)](https://blog.google/technology/google-labs/jules/) - [TechCrunch - Google's AI coding agent Jules is now out of beta](https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/googles-ai-coding-agent-jules-is-now-out-of-beta/) - [GitHub - Introducing Agent HQ](https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/welcome-home-agents/) - [GitHub Docs - About third-party agents](https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/about-third-party-agents) - [Google - 100 things we announced at I/O 2026](https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/google-io-2026-all-our-announcements/) - [Google Antigravity - Introducing Google Antigravity (November 2025)](https://antigravity.google/blog/introducing-google-antigravity) - [Computerworld - Google snatches Windsurf execs in a $2.4B deal](https://www.computerworld.com/article/4021763/google-snatches-windsurf-execs-in-a-2-4b-deal.html) - [Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings - CEO remarks](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/alphabet-earnings-q2-2026/) - [Firebase - Migrating from Firebase Studio](https://firebase.google.com/docs/studio/migrating-project) - [Google Developers Blog - Transitioning Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI](https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transitioning-gemini-cli-to-antigravity-cli/) - [Google One Help - Use Google AI Pro benefits (English)](https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406?hl=en) - [Google One Help - Usar las ventajas de Google AI Pro (Spanish)](https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/14534406?hl=es) - [Google One - Google AI plans](https://one.google.com/about/google-ai-plans/) - [Kiro - Agentic engineering in the cloud](https://kiro.dev/blog/agentic-engineering-in-the-cloud/) - [Claude Code Docs - Use Claude Code in the cloud](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/claude-code-on-the-web) - [ChatGPT - Codex pricing](https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/pricing) - [GitHub Docs - About Copilot in the cloud](https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/agents/coding-agent/about-coding-agent) - [Cursor Docs - Cloud Agents](https://cursor.com/docs/cloud-agent) - [GitHub - Octoverse 2026](https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-commits-pushes-reach-new-highs-in-2026-as-developers-build-with-agents/) - [PRarena - agent pull requests on GitHub](https://github.com/aavetis/PRarena) - [Amplifying - coding agents index](https://amplifying.ai/coding-agents.md) - [Google Antigravity - Changelog](https://antigravity.google/docs/changelog) - [Google Antigravity - Remote Agents](https://antigravity.google/docs/remote-agents/) - [Google Antigravity - Plans](https://antigravity.google/docs/plans) - [Google Antigravity on X - remote agents](https://x.com/antigravity/status/2118530564428833010) - [TestingCatalog - Cloud execution is coming to Antigravity soon](https://www.testingcatalog.com/cloud-execution-is-coming-to-antigravity-soon/) - [Hacker News - Jules winding down on Dec 31, 2026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294605) - [Hacker News - comment by mkobit](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50298309) - [Hacker News - comment by rvz](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294640) - [X - replies to the Jules shutdown post (GravityRsch, JordanScarrott5, _InYOB_, RayLin_AI)](https://x.com/GravityRsch/status/2115896879313809507) - [dev.to - Google's Jules shuts down December 31](https://dev.to/piekwerk/googles-jules-shuts-down-december-31-7-days-left-to-export-your-coding-agents-memories-and-setup-5oi) - [GitHub - linuxmalaysia pull request 41](https://github.com/linuxmalaysia/all-my-notes-as-linux-sysadmin/pull/41) - [AWS - Amazon Q Developer end of support announcement](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/amazon-q-developer-end-of-support-announcement/) ## Related - [Thread - How coding agents compete](https://thebeat.dev/threads/how-coding-agents-compete/) - [Thread - How AI features get priced](https://thebeat.dev/threads/how-ai-features-get-priced/) - [The Beat (W44) - the Jules notice](https://thebeat.dev/issues/2026-W44/) --- Part of [The Beat - developer marketing, on the record](https://thebeat.dev/). 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