I previously covered the new Apple Home AI features revealed at WWDC 2026, which include several quality-of-life improvements, including auto-updating notifications, smarter camera search, automatic tracking and stitching of multiple videos for a single event, and higher-resolution recordings, among others.
Like many Apple Home features, these features are only available to iCloud+ customers. However, at the event, Apple didn’t notify which plans will get access to these features. Today, we get the answer in the release notes of macOS Golden Gate beta 3, and you are not going to like it.
What’s the hidden cost of Home AI features
Apple offers multiple tiers of iCloud plans, with the cheapest plan starting at $0.99 for 50GB of storage. The rest of the plans are:
- 200GB: 200 GB: $2.99/month
- 2 TB: $9.99/month
- 6 TB: $29.99/month
- 12 TB: $59.99/month
While I was not hopeful that the new Home AI feature would be included with the cheapest plan, I was sure that users with 200GB would get access to it. But that’s not happening, as Apple has restricted the Apple Home AI features to the 2TB iCloud+ plan and above. That means you have to at least pay $9.99/month if you want to enjoy the new AI features in the Apple Home app.
Why does 2TB feel like the wrong cutoff?
HomeKit Secure Video has always required a paid iCloud plan, and the tiers work like this: the 50GB plan gets you one camera, the 200GB plan supports up to five, and the 2TB plan removes the camera limit entirely.
I can somewhat understand why Apple excluded the AI features from the 50GB tier, since it only supports a single camera. But the 200GB plan is a different story. It already supports up to five cameras, which is exactly the kind of multi-camera setup that benefits most from AI summaries and cross-camera search.
Apple should have made these features available starting at the 200GB tier instead of forcing users all the way up to 2TB just to get value out of a feature their setup already qualifies for. It feels like an obvious cash grab by Apple, designed to push users to pay more to help offset Apple’s rising AI costs.
