Google just made its Windows AI free. Microsoft still wants £30 a month for Copilot.
If you run a small business and you’re paying for Microsoft 365 Copilot, you need to see this. On 10 September 2026, Google released a native Gemini app for Windows, five months after it launched on macOS only. It’s free to download, it works on both Windows 10 and Windows 11, and it does a surprising amount of what businesses are already paying Copilot £30 a month per seat to get.
We spent this week testing it against a client’s existing Copilot setup, and the comparison is worth fifteen minutes of anyone’s time before the next renewal invoice lands.
What actually launched
Google’s Gemini app installs like any normal Windows program and sits quietly in your taskbar (reported by tech-ish). Press Alt+Space from anywhere and an overlay appears on top of whatever you’re working on. It can read what’s on your screen, summarise or rewrite it, and answer questions about it directly, no switching to a browser tab, no copying and pasting into a chat window.
It also connects to your existing Google account, so it can draft from your Gmail, pull context from Drive and Docs, and check your Calendar. Image generation (Nano Banana) and short video generation (Gemini Omni) are bundled into the same free app, alongside ordinary chat.
Why this matters now, not eventually
Google didn’t launch this quietly. It’s a direct shot at the assumption that a capable AI assistant on your desktop has to come with a monthly invoice attached, and it landed at exactly the point in the year when a lot of UK businesses are reviewing their software renewals ahead of the new financial year.
It’s also not Google’s first attempt at this. Gemini has been available in a browser tab and inside Google Workspace for a while. What changed on 10 September is that it now behaves like an operating system feature rather than a website you have to remember to open, which is the exact advantage Copilot has held over every browser-based rival until now.
What Microsoft is still charging
Microsoft 365 Copilot’s headline UK price is £30 per user per month, and it’s an add-on: you can’t buy it without a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription underneath it. Some resellers are currently offering discounted annual rates, around £16.10 a seat, but the standard list price a small business sees on renewal is £30 (per Expertsure’s 2026 UK pricing breakdown).
Run that across a five-person team and Copilot alone is £1,800 a year, before you’ve measured whether everyone is actually using it for more than the odd email draft.
Where free stops being free
We won’t pretend this is a clean like-for-like swap, because it isn’t, and the uncomfortable parts matter more than the headline.
Copilot is built into Windows itself, wired into File Explorer, Office and the taskbar in ways a separate app can’t match. Gemini for Windows is a standalone application you open, not an operating system feature.
And “free” only covers the base model with daily usage limits. If you want Gemini’s most capable model, higher usage caps and priority access, Google’s own AI Pro plan costs £18.99 a month in the UK, according to Google’s official UK subscriptions page. That’s still roughly a third of Copilot’s list price, but it isn’t nothing.
There’s a UK-specific gap too. Spark, Google’s more autonomous agent feature for handling multi-step tasks, isn’t available here yet: Google’s own support documentation excludes the UK alongside the EEA, Switzerland and Nigeria (flagged in Kompozy’s hands-on review). If part of what you were hoping to get from an AI assistant is autonomous task handling rather than chat and drafting, that gap is worth knowing about before you plan around it.
The audit we’d run before your next renewal
This is exactly the kind of decision we walk clients through, and it doesn’t take long to do properly:
- Pull last month’s Copilot usage report, if your admin console tracks it, and see how many seats actually opened it.
- List the three tasks your team uses Copilot for most. Drafting emails, summarising documents and rewriting text are all things the free Gemini app already does.
- Check whether anyone actually needs Copilot’s deeper Office integration (formulas in Excel, slide generation in PowerPoint) or the Windows-level features Gemini doesn’t touch yet.
- If the honest answer is “mostly drafting and summarising,” trial Gemini free for two weeks on those seats before the next Copilot invoice renews.
Most small businesses we speak to bought AI tools under pressure to “have an AI strategy” rather than against a clear list of tasks. That’s how you end up paying £30 a month per seat for a feature set a free app now covers for most of the working day.
It’s also worth checking who actually holds the licence. We’ve seen more than one business still paying for Copilot seats assigned to people who left the company, simply because nobody reviewed the admin console after the initial rollout. A free alternative on the desk of every remaining employee is as good a reason as any to finally do that housekeeping.
The bottom line
Google didn’t just ship a nice-to-have. It shipped a genuine, free alternative to the most common daily uses of a product UK businesses are paying real money for, and it did it in a single week. That doesn’t mean cancel Copilot outright. It means the maths behind your current AI spend changed on 10 September, whether you’ve noticed yet or not.
Before your next renewal, it’s worth twenty minutes checking which side of that £30-a-month gap your business actually sits on. We offer a free 30-minute AI audit to UK small businesses who want a straight answer on which tools they’re using, which ones they’re paying for out of habit, and which decision Google’s launch has just made for them.