Nothing might charge you for pressing the AI button on its future phones

Nothing’s latest smartphones, the Phone 3a and the Phone 3a Pro, come a with the company’s own AI-powered dashboard, called Essential Space. It is a place to organize your screenshots, images, voice notes, and reminders, and can be activated with a dedicated button called the Essential Key. While these features are free to use at the moment, Nothing might charge you a subscription to use these services in the future.

Nothing aims to evolve Essential Space into an AI-powered second brain solution for storing stuff that you may otherwise not be too motivated to remember. While it’s in beta right now, the presence of a dedicated activation button indicates Nothing is serious about making it a central feature on the future phones.

The services are free at the moment, and Nothing has not shared any details about charging a subscription fee in the future. However, Android Authority has discovered references to a “free trial” in the app’s source code, hinting the service would require payment eventually. The code mentions a “1 year free trial,” “AI credits,” and a “monthly processing limit,” all which attribute to the likeliness of a paid subscription once the trial period is over.

Another block of code gives us some inkling on what to expect in terms of pricing. It includes a mention of “USD 120” in the onboarding workflow, and this could very well mean Nothing plans to charge the amount for you to access current and future features in Essential Space. Although $120 is likely too steep for a monthly payment, it is most likely what you would be expected to pay annually, thus, equating to a $10 payment per month.

Of course, this is less than the $20 you would pay for Google Gemini Advanced or ChatGPT Pro monthly, but can seem unreasonable since Nothing’s app offers far limited usability — and can only be accessed through a Nothing phone.

If Nothing is to implement these prices, we can expect some clarity when Essential Space is out of beta. The app was recently updated to add Camera Capture, which fetches information from an image or a screenshot similar to Google Lens but also saves this information in Essential Space for you to revisit later.

Meanwhile, Nothing has promised features, such as Smart Collections, Focused Search, and Flip to Record, will arrive with future updates. We will know about the exact utility of each once they are available to try.