6x the price of 3.1 flash lite
$0.15 / million tokens
$1.00 / 1,000,000 tokens per hour (storage price)
I much prefer the OpenAI/DeepSeek way of pricing caching where you don't have to think about storage price at all - you pay for cached tokens if you reuse the same prefix within a (loosely defined) time period.Compare to the GPT-5.5 announcement: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5/
Cost per task is a more productive measure, but obviously a more difficult one to benchmark.
They continue to focus on smaller models while openai and anthropic are increasing compute requirements for their SOTA models.
They are just refining their current models while they finish training the next generation.
They will all come out at about the same time. Anthropic, OpenAi, Google, xAI
Hold on, I think this claim needs some hard data. Here you go gentlemen:
https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-openais-gpt-5...
There might be a harness difference, but also, this CTF-type benchmark might not capture the capability difference fully.
Can you link to a source?
https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...
> Create animated SVG of a frog on a boat rowing through jungle river. Single page self contained HTML page with SVG
3.5 Flash: Thinking Medium - 7516 tokenshttps://gistpreview.github.io/?5c9858fd2057e678b55d563d9bff0...
3.5 Flash: Thinking High - 7280 tokens
https://gistpreview.github.io/?1cab3d70064349d08cf5952cdc165...
3.1 Pro - 28,258 tokens
https://gistpreview.github.io/?6bf3da2f80487608b9525bce53018...
Though 3.1 took 3 minutes of thinking to generate, but it only one that got animated movement.
[1] https://github.com/htdt/godogen
[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ozZmWcSwieZQG0muYjbj7Xjhhlz...
https://gistpreview.github.io/?3496285c5dac5ba10ebbc0b201a1a...
Gemini 2.5 Pro - 5,325 tokens:
https://gistpreview.github.io/?cc5e0fefeaaffecd228c16c95e736...
Gemini 2.5 Flash - 7,556 tokens:
https://gistpreview.github.io/?263d6058fe526a62b8f270f0620ec...
https://gistpreview.github.io/?da742884e5e830ce71ee4db877519...
OFC this is just for fun, but nevertheless gave me working code on first try.
8112 tokens @ 52.97 TPS, 0.85s TTFT
https://gistpreview.github.io/?7bdefff99aca89d1bc12405323bd4...
Full session: https://gist.github.com/abtinf/7bdefff99aca89d1bc12405323bd4...
Generated with LM Studio on a Macbook Pro M2 Max
https://huggingface.co/hesamation/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.6...
Gemini 3.5 Flash: $0.75 input / $4.50 output per 1M tokens, 1M context window. The output price explicitly "includes thinking tokens" — which is why it's higher than a typical flash-class model.
For comparison within the Gemini lineup: - Gemini 2.5 Flash: $0.30 / $2.50 - Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite: $0.25 / $1.50 - Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview: $2.00 / $12.00
So 3.5 Flash is ~2.5x more expensive input vs 2.5 Flash. The pricing and "including thinking tokens" framing position it as a reasoning-capable flash model rather than just a pure speed optimization.
If this is the big model release out of google, its a disappointent.
(I suspect you're viewing the "flex" pricing).
> The pricing and "including thinking tokens" framing position it as a reasoning-capable flash model rather than just a pure speed optimization
Every Gemini model starting with 2.5 has been a reasoning model.
Coding, however, is solved like magic. Easier to add tests, to be fair.
AI psychosis would be the problem people talk about more, not just outright agreement but subtle ways of making you feel confident in your ideas. "yes, buy that domain name buy these other ones for defensibility"
(the domain name is dumb and completely unmarketable)
More often than not, people are using images in responses that go awry. Which is fair, the models are sold as multi-modal, but image analyses is still at gpt-4.0 text-analyses levels.
Also knowledge cutoff issues, where people forget the models exist months to a year or more in the past.
And when I say all the time, I mean it, and this is for Opus 4.7 Adaptive.
I often have to say, please do searches and cite sources, as if it doesn't it will confidently give me wrong or outdated information.
If you're often asking questions about a topic that's not in your specialist knowledge you won't notice them.
...my chats are all pretty long and involve personal conversations, or I've deleted them. It's a lot to ask for someone to post receipts. The number of complaints is enough data.
No matter how big the model is there will be edge cases where it has no data or is out of date. In these cases it just makes stuff up. You can detect it yourself by looking for words like usually or often when it states facts, e.g. "the mall often has a Starbucks." I asked it about a Genshin Impact character released in June 2025 and it consistently interpreted the name (Aino) as my player character because Aino wasn't in its data.
Honestly I'm surprised your haven't encountered it if you're using it more than casually. Pro is much better but not perfect.
Claude also believes it knows how AWS' KMS works, quite confidently, while getting things wrong. I have a separate "this is how KMS replication actually works" file just to deal with its misconceptions.
For gemini, I typically use it to query information from large corpuses, but it often web searches and hallucinates instead of reading the actual corpus. On a book series, it will hallucinate chapters and events which, while reasonable and plausible, do not exist. "Go look at the files and see if your reference is correct" shows that it's not correct, and it's a mandatory step. But that doesn't prevent hallucination, but makes sure you catch it after the fact, just like a method in a class that doesn't exist gets found out by the compiler. The LLM still hallucinated it.
The fix is easy enough though, a line in my global AGENTS.md instructing agents to search/ask for documentation before working on API integrations.
I was trying to understand a game I've been playing, The Last Spell. I asked it for a tier list of omens -- which ones the community considers most important. At least a few of the names it posts are hallucinated ("omen of the sun" does not exist, and the omens that give extra gold are "savings," "fortune," and "great wealth").
Obviously not a critical use case but issues like this do keep me on my toes regarding whether the thing is working at all. I should ask 3.5 flash to do the same job.
Feels like the AI pricing noose is tightening sooner rather than later.
I did not expect such a huge (3x) price increase from 3.0 Flash and I bet many people will not just blindly upgrade as the value proposition is widely different.
One interesting point to note is that Google marked the model as Stable in contrast to nearly everything else being perpetually set as Preview.
[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-5-flash [1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-3-1-pro-preview
That's everything I needed to know.
Does that mean this model is production ready?
3.1 has 57M output tokens from Intelligence Index, 3.5 Flash has 73M, so not a lot more, and 3.5 is a bit cheaper, I don't get how 3.5 can be 74% more expensive.
GDM is making (or has been backed into a corner into making) the bet that high throughput, low latency, low capability models are the path forward.
That probably works for vibe coded apps by non-practitioners.
I suspect that practitioners/professionals will wait longer for better results.
And Google is trying to make something affordable enough for a mass market, ad-supported audience.
They aren’t hyper focused on enterprise like Anthropic is. And that’s okay. There’s room for different players in different markets.
It’s not possible to uptrain on preview releases and it did not get that much love for a while.
Plus the vibe of the gemini models are so weird particularly when it comes to tool calling
At this point I kinda need them to shock me to make the switch
Also concerned about Gemini models being benchmaxxed generally
I would say they are the least benchmaxxed out of all the top labs, for coding. They've always been behind opus/gpt-xhigh for agentic stuff (mostly because of poor tool use), but in raw coding tasks and ability to take a paper/blog/idea and implement it, they've been punching above their benchmarks ever since 2.5. I would still take 2.5 over all the "chinese model beats opus" if I could run that locally, tbh.
And I guess Gemini 3.5 pro will have the pricing increment, too. 12 x 5 = 60?
It seems like google does want us to use Chinese models.
Gemini 2.5 flash: $0.30/$2.50
Gemini 3.0 flash preview: $0.50/$3.00
Gemini 3.5 flash: $1.50/$9.00
Interesting pricing direction. I don't think we have ever seen a 3x price increase for in the immediate next same-sized model (and lol @ 3 only ever getting a preview).
3.5 flash costs similar to Gemini 2.5 pro which was $1.25/$10
Or maybe they think because their benchmarks are good they can ramp up the prices. Seems like they don’t have the market share to justify a move like that yet to me.
My guess: it's the price at which they make more money than if they rent the TPUs to other companies.
The Gemini team has had trouble securing enough TPUs for their user's needs. They struggle with load and their rate limits are really bad. Maybe at a higher price, they have a better chance at getting more TPUs assigned?
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-flas...
3.1 flash lite isn’t quite as good as 3 flash preview (which is the most incredible cheap model… I really love it) — but 3.1 is half the price and the insane speed opens up different use cases.
For comparison, Opus models are $5/$25
This model isnt an advancement, its a previous model that runs more compute, which is why it costs more
> Gemini 3.5 Flash’s pricing shifts the Pareto frontier in Text. 8 models from GoogleDeepMind dominate the Text Arena Pareto curve where only 4 labs are represented for top performance in their price tiers.
If not then I’m not using it.
Cancelled my account 3 months ago, only Claude code level capability would bring me back.
Latest update: May 2026
I have a very bad feeling about this lag.
still the cutoff is very much concerning and inconvenient
Not a great bicycle though, it forgot the bar between the pedals and the back wheel and weirdly tangled the other bars.
Expensive too - that pelican cost 13 cents: https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=11&ot=14403&sel=gemini-3.5-fl...
f311a•2h ago
explosion-s•1h ago
hydra-f•10m ago
The Antigravity harness is really well done, so I do agree it's their strong suit. Can't say the same about gemini-cli (though it has a really nice interface)
Would still choose Deepseek for the price