Users May Soon be Paying Samsung for Galaxy AI Features

There is a lot of excitement surrounding the launch of Galaxy AI on Samsung’a new lineup of Galaxy S24 devices. It’s completely justified, at least in my mind, as Galaxy AI brings things like generative AI photo editing and real time call translations to these new phones. However, while these features are very cool, would you specifically pay for them to be on your phone?

Earlier this week, when Samsung announced that it would be bringing this new Galaxy AI to additional phones, it slipped into the fine print the following sentence: “Galaxy AI features will be provided for free until the end of 2025 on supported Samsung Galaxy devices.”

We reached out to Samsung for a bit of clarity on the subject, but it’s there in plain English. For the time being, these Galaxy AI features are free to use, but at some point, it appears users will need to pay for them one way or another.

Now, we haven’t heard anything about pricing or how paying for AI features would work (a monthly subscription?), but what we can tell you is that we are not a fan. Let me briefly explain why. Samsung launches the Galaxy S24 lineup with 7 years of Android updates. It’s the longest they have ever supported a phone. The feature hyped the most by Samsung at Unpacked and other marketing materials on these devices is Galaxy AI. In fact, I assume they hope to convince people to buy these phones purely based on the AI features. Does anyone else see the problem? It would be wrong to sell a device with these features free to use, then turn around and ask them to pay for the feature two years down the road without a more proper heads up. That’s how I see this situation.

To be clear, Samsung has yet to state exactly which features users will be paying for, which is important to note because a lot of Galaxy AI’s features have more to do with Google than they do Samsung. For example, Chat Assist and Circle to Search are more Google’s AI magic than Samsung. Again, we reached out to Samsung for comment and will update when and if we hear back.

We’ll leave you with a question: Would you pay for Galaxy AI on your Samsung device? If so, how much?