This understates the cost increase. 3.5 Flash also uses more tokens. artificialanalysis.ai shows these difference to run the whole eval, which I think is more realistic pricing:

Gemini 2.5 flash (27 score): $172 (1.0x)

Gemini 2.5 pro (35 score): $649 (3.8x)

Gemini 3.0 Flash (46 score): $278 (1.6x)

Gemini 3.5 Flash (55 score): $1,552 (9.0x or 2.4x compared to 2.5 pro)

This is a massive price increase... 5.6x compared to Gemini 3.0 Flash

They probably never intended to keep serving cheap models. This is a natural way to introduce the squeeze, now that they have people who built services on their API. It makes a lot of sense to have an abstraction layer where the provider doesn't matter. If you are working in Kotlin, Koog is excellent.

If Google is actually getting cheaper inference than everyone else with their TPUs, this smells like trouble to me. Maybe serving LLMs at a profit is proving difficult.

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.

We need another "Deepseek moment" or else it will become impossible for the regular dude to use AI. It will become something that only big companies can afford.

3.5 flash is listed as stable rather than preview, or am I misreading?

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-flas...

To me this is almost like a tone-deaf naming change.

Empty Slot (new Pro as Mythos competitor?)

Old Pro -> now Flash

Old Flash -> now Flash Lite

Old Flash Lite -> now Gemma (and not served by Google)

I say "almost" because the situation is more fluid and unstable than a normal naming change. If Apple were to do this with laptops, maybe it'd be like, Air gets better and pricier and becomes Pro-level model, Neo same way becomes Air-level model, etc. But Apple's too design oriented to do something like that. Google, well...

This change has made me decide to move to a multi-provider situation like through OpenRouter for consumer-facing LLM api in a service I'm building. I just can't trust Google to not constantly rearrange everything under our feet. Doesn't mean I won't use Gemini, but it clearly means I need to have others in the mix ready to go. In fact I used to use lots of Flash Lite, which is now Gemma territory, and I can't get that served by Google anymore and don't want to run my own hardware.

But in any case, I'd compare this "Flash" model with previous "Pro" on all metrics. It's kinda like if in clothes a Small suddenly became what was a Large, or at Starbucks a Grande became the new de facto Venti. And only for the new! drinks.

And if we think this way, it's possible that prices are actually falling?

3.1 flash lite — $0.25/$1.50 — plus insanely fast.

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

Their rationale might be that it’s size and intelligence are growing relative to the market.

Fwiw it’s beating Claude Sonnet in most benchmarking (benchmaxxing?), yet they’ve priced it almost half off on a per token basis.

Question is are you going to persuade anyone with this argument?

Are there many devs at Google who legit prefer Gemini over Claude and Codex? Would love to hear about that.

Gen AI is unprofitable, especially at the insanely cheap rates they've been offering to get people in the door. So expect more increases in the future.

To be fair, Gemini 3.1 flash _lite_ supports structured output (guaranteed json), it’s super fast, runs circles around 2.5 flash and costs $0.25/$1.50.

I use it _a lot_ and it’s very capable if you just plan correctly. I actually almost exclusively use 3.1 flash lite and 2.5 flash lite (even cheaper) and we have 99.5% accuracy in what we do.

That said, I think we’ll see the lite/flash models and the pro models will diverge more price wise. The pro models will become more and more expensive.

I don't think they're really comparable. Seems they created the Flash-Lite tier to take the spot of the old Flash models.

In general, Gemini flash is still relatively cheaper compared to the "mini" version of the other big 2. However, I agree that newer version seem to have multiple X price increase (similar to the new ChatGPT) and we certainly need competition from the open source models to keep these guys in check with pricing.

I use Gemini models in Junie daily. When I need accuracy I switch to Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (why it is still in preview?), but it burns thru credits leaving me topping up $5 every day. 3.1 Flash lite is just not accurate enough. 3 Flash is sweet spot just as Jetbrains suggests it is.

Maybe I'll look at Opus again, but it just was slower, much more expensive and worst at all - wasn't listening to you instructions.

Yeah, it is a massive jump in price, hardly a "Flash" model anymore... I wonder if they'll release flash lite or something with a bit more affordable price point.

And they are using this to power search answers?

It might be temporary pricing given that 3.5 Flash is actually superior to the existing 3.1 Pro in almost all regards, so they're in a bit of a lurch as 3.1 Pro really doesn't make sense given that 3.5 Pro has been delayed a bit.

That's a lot. DeepSeek v4 Flash is just over a tenth the price, and DeepSeek v4 Pro is roughly the same price (currently heavily discounted, but will be $1.74).

I mean, the benchmarks for Gemini 3.5 Flash are very strong, but at those prices it has to be. I guess the time of subsidized tokens from the big guys is slowly coming to an end.

At the same time, it is supposedly Gemini 3.1 Pro level at 3/4 the price

and far cheaper than comparable models, Gemini Pro is cheaper than Claude Sonnet (Anthropic still gets to charge a brand premium)

Gemini 2.5 flash was the best Gemini model.

Not the most intelligent but perfect balance of cheap, fast and not-too-dumb.

just subscribe to the plan, cheaper