Ask HN: Why are people using Claude or ChatGPT when Gemini is free?

Genuine question - I currently pay for ChatGPT Plus but I am wondering if I can just use Gemini for everything? What are the pros and cons in your experience. My main use cases are debugging web dev stuff, asking which tool is best for different parts of my side projects, generating an image once in a while for my blog posts/youtube videos, and sometimes just asking random questions / curiosities (the same as I would have asked on google/wikipedia back in the day)

Gemini is like a wild horse. It bucks and refuses to use tools, moves many things, deletes whenever it wants, I want a kind old horse, and I find that in Claude, it does what I want, usually exactly the way I want it, usually clocking in under a dollar per task. I've seen gemini do plenty of one-shots, but I still have not seen it--even in its costliest form--properly navigate large monorepos or less well-trodden libraries. As for chatGPT, I don't like them either. Their codex model is okay, but again the consistency isn't there, I feel like I can ask claude more questions per session and not have it decay

If it's free...

which Gemini free are you talking about? Gemini from aistudio.google.com ?

my guess would be asymmetrical information (most non tech people don't know it exist) and the explicit statement that google will use any prompt shared there, in its free tier, for training and improving their own models