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by primaprashant7 hours ago |
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upvoteby mchusma7 hours ago|
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3.6 Flash would be a great model at 3.0 flash pricing. At this pricing, its thoroughly trounced by about 10 models on cost/performance including Grok 4.5. 3.5 Flash-ite would be a great model at 2.5 flash-lite pricing, as is, its trounced by many models including Deepseek v4 Flash.

As is, they are thoroughly outclassed for most usecases. I will say the one area where i do see Gemini punching above its weight class is in tasks that are effectively "Google this for me" / knowledge stuff. So it does have a role, and I do use it. So while I think Google is still in a strong position overall, they are really stuck as a tier 2 AI player right now with text models. They are tier 1 in bio, images, and video.

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upvoteby Melatonic7 hours ago|
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Could also be that they are pricing it at levels where they actually make money. Without seeing the behind the scenes compute cost on all of these its hard to really judge.

That being said with any open model we of course do know the total cost (or estimate)

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upvoteby SwellJoe7 hours ago|
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3.5 Flash was always too expensive for a "flash" model. They marketed it as "near frontier" level, but there are several order-of-magnitude cheaper open models that compete with it.
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upvoteby XCSme6 hours ago|
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In my tests, 3.6 Flash is NOT more token efficient, so it actually ends up costing more than 3.5 Flash, even with the output price reduction.

EDIT: It less less verbose in final output though, but it reasons more.

I assume the optimization comes when you have long-running tasks with many tool calls, and by reasoning more, it reduces the number of tool calls needed.

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upvoteby jeffybefffy5191 hours ago|
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I wonder if this is a plateau towards the real pricing of AI, if you layer in gemini-2.0-flash at $0.10 / $0.70 then its a 15x price increase to 3.5/3.6 flash. But it hasnt gone up again which is interesting.
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upvoteby jjice7 hours ago|
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Am I off, or does Google have the pricing that varies the most between model generation releases?
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upvoteby m_w_7 hours ago|
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It seems that they're trying to push up-market, or at least they were.

Given the extremely competitive releases of GLM 5.2 and DeepSeek V4 (both pro and flash), I don't think there'll be appetite for it.

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upvoteby urbsgpw2 hours ago|
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It seems like they're sticking to a static pricing plan that was made when the only relevant competition were the US labs (im not counting deepseek 2025 as serious competition -> glm and then kimi on the other hand, now that's a different story).
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upvoteby LaurensBER7 hours ago|
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Pricing often reflects what the vendors (expects) the customer is willing to pay. It seems that Google is still trying to find their niche in the market.
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upvoteby zuzululu1 hours ago|
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2.5 flash was the only reason we were paying four digits a month to Google....

i guess we'll use 3.0 flash but thats going to get replaced too right ?

these flash lite models aren't very reliable or consistent

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