Gemini API Pricing (October 2026): Every Model, the January 1 Price Doubling, and What a Real Workload Costs

Gemini API pricing: the short answer

As of October 4, 2026, Google's rate card prices Gemini 3.8 Flash, its newest Flash model, at $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens through December 31, 2026. On January 1, 2027 that becomes $1.50 and $7.50. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview is $2 and $12. Batch requests are half price. There is a free tier, but on it Google uses your content to improve its products. Priced on one real workload, Flash is less than half of Claude Sonnet 5.5 or GPT-6.1 Sol today, and still cheaper after the increase.

The headline everyone else skips is the date. Google has already published next year's price, and it is double this year's. If you are choosing a model this quarter, you are choosing at a promotional rate.

Every Gemini text model, one table

Paid tier, Standard requests, per million tokens, read from Google's pricing page today (it says it was last updated October 1):

Output prices include thinking tokens, which matters more than it looks: a model that "thinks" before answering bills that reasoning as output. How Argon's price lines up against Claude is in Claude vs Gemini.

Update, October 28, 2026. Gemini 4 Argon is now on Google's rate card (the page says it was last updated October 28). It is paid tier only, with no free tier: $2 per million input tokens and $10 output through November 30, 2026, then $4 and $20 starting December 1. Cached input is $0.10, then $0.20, and Batch and Flex are half price. So Argon's introductory period is about two months, and a 2027 budget should use the December price. The same day, Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon, its next frontier model, at the same $2 / $10 introductory price and $4 / $20 after it. Carbon went to a group of cyber defenders first; since November 10 any developer on the paid tier can call it (details in the November update below). One more change since October 4: Google's page no longer lists Gemini 3.7 Flash or 3.5 Flash. Those two rows above are from the October 4 read. If you still call either one, check the model's status before you budget for it.

November 2026 update: Gemini 4 Carbon is on the API, and 2.5 Pro gets rerouted December 1

On November 10, 2026 Google made Gemini 4 Carbon, its most capable model, generally available on the paid tier of the Gemini API. It costs the same as Argon: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output through November 30, then $4 and $20 from December 1. There's no free tier. Google AI Ultra subscribers can also try it inside AI Studio and Google Antigravity.

• Same rate card, different bill. Carbon and Argon have identical prices per token, and Google bills every token either model processes, thinking tokens included. Google describes Argon as giving "lower token spend per turn" than Carbon. So on the same task Carbon will usually cost more, even though the price list says they're equal. Test both on your own prompts and compare the invoice, not the rate.
• What the December price means. On the workload priced below (150 million input and 30 million output tokens a month), Carbon or Argon costs $600 a month through November, the same as Claude Sonnet 5.5. From December 1 it's $1,200, the same as Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 / $20, before Carbon's longer thinking adds anything. Cached input is $0.10, then $0.20, and Carbon supports implicit caching only.
• 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash get moved for you on December 1. Google's changelog (November 2) says requests to gemini-2.5-pro will route to Gemini 3.8 Flash and be billed at 3.8 Flash rates, and gemini-2.5-flash will route to 3.5 Flash-Lite at its rates. On the workload below, 2.5 Pro costs $487.50 a month; the same calls on 3.8 Flash cost $225 in December and $450 from January 1. Cheaper, but it's a different model answering, so re-check quality before December 1, not after.
• New on November 11: Gemini Decision. A separate Decisions API for yes/no, category and rubric answers across text, images, audio, video and PDFs. It's $0.10 per million input tokens and produces zero output tokens, with a free tier and no Batch option. Each question adds a few tokens for its own instructions, so the bill isn't only your input. If a job only needs a label (route this ticket, flag this invoice), that's a cheaper meter than any model that writes an answer.

November 12: Gemini 4 Hydrogen costs what 3.8 Flash will cost in January

On November 12, 2026 Google made Gemini 4 Hydrogen generally available on the Gemini API: $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output, flat across its whole 1 million-token context, with a free tier. It's Google's fast model for everyday coding and agent work, and Google says it's now the default model in Google Search and in the Antigravity agent.

• The price is 3.8 Flash's January price. Hydrogen costs exactly what 3.8 Flash costs from January 1, 2027. On the workload priced below, that's $450 a month for either one from January. Until December 31, 3.8 Flash is half that ($225), so Hydrogen only costs more for the rest of this year. Google says Hydrogen beats Argon on the Artificial Analysis index at its default setting (51 vs. 50) and finishes tasks 2.5 times faster than 3.8 Flash, so the January decision is a better model at the same rate.
• Against Claude and OpenAI. $450 sits under Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol at $600 on the same workload, and over Claude Haiku 4.5 at $300.
• What the rate card adds. Google bills every token Hydrogen processes, thinking tokens included, and a new fourth thinking level (xhigh) spends more of them. Cached input is $0.075, implicit caching only. The free tier is the same deal as the rest: Google's table says your content is used to improve its products there, and isn't on the paid tier.

The January 1 doubling, and the odd result it creates

Every 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8 Flash rate on the page carries two prices: one "through December 31, 2026" and one "starting January 1, 2027." Input goes from $0.75 to $1.50, output from $3.75 to $7.50, cached input from $0.075 to $0.15, and Batch, Flex and Priority all double with it.

That produces something you don't usually see on a price list. Right now the newest Flash is cheaper than the older one: Gemini 3.5 Flash is $1.50 in and $9.00 out, so 3.8 Flash costs half as much on input and well under half on output. On January 1 the input prices match at $1.50, and 3.8 Flash is still cheaper on output ($7.50 against $9.00). If anything you run is still on 3.5 Flash, moving it now saves money twice: once today, and again next year.

Two practical points. Budget 2027 at the January price, not today's. And if you are testing Flash this quarter to decide whether to build on it, multiply your test bill by two before you compare it to anything.

What one workload costs across Google, Anthropic and OpenAI

Rate cards are hard to compare because nobody's workload is "one million tokens." So here is one shape priced everywhere: 50,000 requests a month (an internal assistant or a support-triage tool at a small company), each with about 3,000 tokens in and 600 tokens out. That's 150 million input and 30 million output tokens a month, Standard tier, no caching, each price from the vendor's own page today.

The spread is 44 to 1 from the cheapest line to the most expensive, on the same work. The full Claude and OpenAI rate cards, including caching and long-context rules, are on the Anthropic API pricing and OpenAI API pricing pages. The bill is the easy part; which of these actually does the job well enough is the question to test before you build, and it is most of what an AI implementation engagement spends its first week on.

Is the Gemini API free?

Partly. Google's own table lists a free tier with "limited access to certain models" and free input and output tokens, and says Google AI Studio usage "is free of charge in all available regions." Most Flash and Flash-Lite models have a free tier. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview doesn't.

The real cost of free is one row in that same table: "Used to improve our products." On the free tier the answer is Yes. On the paid tier it is No. That's the line that should decide it for a business. Testing with public data on the free tier is fine. Customer emails, contracts or anything you'd mind seeing in a training set belong on the paid tier, even if the bill is a few dollars. The free tier's limits also change; Google's page says rate limits are "subject to change," so don't build a product on them. The separate question of how much you can use the Gemini app itself, on the consumer plans, is in Gemini usage limits.

If you already pay for Google AI Pro or Ultra (added November 13, 2026): the plan comes with monthly Gemini API credit, and as of today you claim it inside Google AI Studio instead of across three Google sites. Google's credit guide lists $10 a month on AI Pro, $40 on Ultra 5x and $100 on Ultra 20x; the $4.99 AI Plus plan gets none. Two catches the announcement buries. The credits only apply once your Cloud billing account holds at least $5 of your own money, which is spent after the credits run out. And they go to the primary subscriber only, so family members on the same plan can't claim them. Each month's credit lasts 12 months, so unclaimed months stack. At Hydrogen's $1.50 / $7.50 rates, $10 covers roughly a million input tokens and a million output tokens a month, enough to prototype, not to run a product (Google's credit guide and November 13 announcement).

Is Google AI Studio free?

Yes. Google's pricing page (updated October 7, 2026) says Google AI Studio usage "is free of charge in all available regions." The free plan comes with what Google calls a "modest quota" that resets daily, not on a rolling window. What changes the quota is a consumer subscription: Google AI Pro ($19.99 a month) and Ultra (from $99.99) raise your AI Studio limits and unlock the premium models, Gemini Pro included.

Two catches. A Google AI plan only counts inside the AI Studio website; the moment your code calls the API with a key, you're on the API's free tier or paid rates above, billed separately. And the agents inside AI Studio (Deep Research and the Antigravity preview) aren't covered by any plan; they need a paid API key. So for a business: prototype free in AI Studio, then move anything with customer data to a paid key, for the training reason in the section above.

The extras that add to the bill

• Batch and Flex. Half the Standard price for work that can wait. On 3.8 Flash that's $0.375 in and $1.875 out until December 31.
• Priority. 1.8 times Standard on the Flash models ($1.35 / $6.75 on 3.8 Flash) for requests that can't be slowed down.
• Grounding with Google Search. On Gemini 3 models, 5,000 search requests a month are free, shared across all of them, then $14 per 1,000. One user request can trigger several searches, and Google bills each one.
• Long prompts on Pro. Above 200,000 tokens, 3.1 Pro Preview goes from $2 / $12 to $4 / $18.
• Image and video. Priced separately. One deadline already passed: Google's page says Gemini 2.5 Flash Image was shut down on October 2, 2026, so anything still calling it needs moving to 3.1 Flash Image.

What I'd do this week

If you already call Gemini, look up which model each feature uses. Anything on 3.5 Flash moves to 3.8 Flash today. Then put January's price, not today's, in next year's budget. If you're choosing a vendor, run your real prompts through two models from the cost table above for a week and compare quality per dollar, not price per token.

Sources

• Google AI for Developers, Gemini Developer API pricing: every Gemini rate, the January 1, 2027 step, free versus paid tier, grounding, the 2.5 Flash Image shutdown (page last updated October 1, 2026; read October 4, 2026; re-read October 28, 2026 for Gemini 4 Argon's rates and the models no longer listed)
• Google, "Gemini 4 Carbon: our next frontier model": Carbon's introductory and later price, and who gets it first (October 28, 2026)
• Google, "Gemini 4 Carbon is now available for developers" (November 10, 2026) and the Gemini API changelog: Carbon GA on the paid tier, Gemini Decision (November 11), and the December 1 rerouting of 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash (read November 11, 2026, with the pricing page above re-read the same day)
• Google, "Introducing Gemini 4 Hydrogen" (November 12, 2026) and the Gemini API changelog and pricing page: Hydrogen GA, $1.50 / $7.50 flat, free tier, xhigh thinking level, implicit caching only (read November 12, 2026)
• Claude pricing: Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 4.5 API rates (read October 4, 2026)
• OpenAI API docs, Pricing: GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna standard rates (read October 4, 2026)