gemini-3.6-flash price 50% cut on 2026-08-13
On 2026-08-13, Google changed the published API price of gemini-3.6-flash. The superseded price had stood for 23 days. This is the only recorded price change for this model in the index.
Every metered token direction on gemini-3.6-flash got cheaper that day. A cut is the direction people notice least, because a lower bill rarely prompts anyone to check what changed.
What changed
| Per 1M tokens | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input | $1.50 | $0.75 | -50% |
| Output | $7.50 | $3.75 | -50% |
What it meant in practice
On a reference workload of 50M input and 5M output tokens a month, this change moved the bill from $112.50 to $56.25 a month, a difference of $56.25. The workload is a fixed reference used on every event page so the figures are comparable between them, not a measurement of anyone's usage.
Your recorded history should not change when prices do
A cost tracker carrying a single current-price table would reprice every gemini-3.6-flash session you ran before 2026-08-13 at the new rate, silently restating months you already paid for. See what this change does to a real session, and why dated windows are the fix.
Provenance
Every value here carries a first-party source, and superseded prices are kept rather than overwritten. Windows before the index began are reconstructed from web archives and labelled as archived rather than claimed as first-party.
| Window | Source |
|---|---|
| Input, 2026-07-21 to 2026-08-13 | https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing |
| Input, from 2026-08-13 | https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing |
| Output, 2026-07-21 to 2026-08-13 | https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing |
| Output, from 2026-08-13 | https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing |
Related
Derived from the AI Price Index, last updated 2026-08-17. Licensed CC BY 4.0: reuse this with credit to the dataset page.