Google Launches Gemini 3.5 Flash: A Pricier Yet Ubiquitous AI

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Key Takeaways

1Google has launched Gemini 3.5 Flash, accessible via Google Search and Gemini Enterprise, reaching billions of users.

2The model costs three times more than its predecessor, with a price of $1.50 per million tokens.

3Benchmark costs for Gemini 3.5 Flash reach $1,551.60, significantly surpassing previous models.

💡Why it matters — The price increase could test customers' tolerance for rising costs for advanced AI services.

Google Introduces Gemini 3.5 Flash

At the Google I/O event, Google announced the launch of Gemini 3.5 Flash, an artificial intelligence model that has directly skipped the preview phase to become publicly accessible. This model is now integrated into several flagship Google products, significantly expanding its availability to billions of users worldwide.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is available to everyone through the Gemini app and Google Search's AI mode. Developers can also use it on the Google Antigravity platform, as well as the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio. For businesses, it is integrated into the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Gemini Enterprise.

Technical Features and New Functionalities

The Gemini 3.5 Flash model retains most of the features from the previous Gemini 3.x series, although it does not support computing usage. Its knowledge cutoff date is set for January 2025, and it can process up to 1,048,576 input tokens and 65,536 output tokens. Google has also introduced a new Interactions API, currently in beta, which appears to be their response to server-side history management models, similar to those of OpenAI Responses.

Price Increases and Future Promises

The launch of Gemini 3.5 Flash comes with a notable price increase. The model now costs $1.50 per million inputs and $9 per million outputs, which is three times the price of Gemini 3 Flash Preview and six times that of Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. This pricing brings it closer to Gemini 3.1 Pro, which is priced at $2 and $12 respectively. The Gemini team has also announced that 3.5 Pro will be launched "next month," likely at an even higher price.

This trend of price increases is not unique to Google. For example, OpenAI's GPT-5.5 costs twice as much as GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is about 1.46 times more expensive than 4.6, taking into account the new tokenizer.

Benchmark Costs and Comparison with Competitors

Benchmark costs for Gemini 3.5 Flash are significant. According to Artificial Analysis, running the benchmark for this model costs $1,551.60, much more than the Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, which amounts to $892.28. In comparison, other models like Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 also show high costs, reflecting a general trend of price increases in the AI sector. For instance, the cost for Claude Opus 4.7 in Adaptive Reasoning and Maximum Effort mode reaches $5,117.14, while for GPT-5.5, it is $3,357.00 in very high mode.

Usage Example and Cost

To illustrate the capabilities of Gemini 3.5 Flash, a request was made to generate an SVG of a pelican on a bicycle. The result, described as impressive, required 11 input tokens and 14,403 output tokens, for a total cost of about 13 cents. A user on Hacker News even commented that the pelican looked ready for a cryptocurrency conference in Miami.