Gemini 3.5 Flash Lands With a Hefty Price Hike
Google's latest Flash model skips preview and goes straight to GA — at 3x to 6x the cost of its predecessors.
Google dropped Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O, and your API bill is about to notice. The model costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $9 per million output tokens. That's triple the price of Gemini 3 Flash Preview and six times what Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite charged.
In an unusual move, Google skipped the preview phase entirely, pushing 3.5 Flash straight to general availability. No beta testing period, no gradual rollout — just a full launch at a significantly steeper price point.
The pricing signals Google's confidence in the model's capabilities, but it also marks a clear shift in the Flash line's value proposition. Flash was supposed to be the budget tier. At these rates, developers building token-heavy applications will need to recalculate their cost projections fast.