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Google cuts Gemini 3 Flash input pricing 17% to $0.25 per million tokens
Draft — pending editorial review
Google cut Gemini 3 Flash input pricing from $0.30 to $0.25 per million tokens on August 10, 2026, a 17% reduction. Output pricing holds at $2.50 per million. The cut matches GPT-5 mini on input cost while offering a context window 2.5 times longer at 1M tokens.
Google reduced Gemini 3 Flash input pricing to $0.25 per million tokens on August 10, 2026, down from $0.30. Output pricing is unchanged at $2.50 per million tokens. The change applies immediately across the Gemini API, Vertex AI, and AI Studio, and appears in Google’s pricing documentation.
This is the second Flash-tier reduction of 2026. The move puts Gemini 3 Flash at exact input-price parity with OpenAI’s GPT-5 mini ($0.25 per million tokens, priced August 2025) while carrying a 1,048,576-token context window against mini’s 400,000.
What changed
| Metric | Before | After | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input, per MTok | $0.30 | $0.25 | −17% |
| Output, per MTok | $2.50 | $2.50 | — |
Cached-input and batch pricing scale from the new base rate. Google did not announce corresponding cuts for Gemini 3 Pro.
Why it matters
Input tokens dominate cost in retrieval and summarization workloads, where prompts routinely run 50–100× longer than completions. At the new rate, a pipeline processing 10B input tokens monthly saves $500 per month — small per-workload, decisive at platform scale, and a direct answer to the volume-tier pricing war that began with DeepSeek-V3.2’s sparse-attention cuts in September 2025.
Our Gemini 3 Flash vs GPT-5 mini comparison and the pricing columns on the leaderboard reflect the new rate as of August 10, 2026.
Correction policy: pricing figures are re-verified against vendor documentation on every data refresh; this post’s figures were last checked August 10, 2026.