r/Bard • u/vladislavkochergin01 • May 19 '26
News 3.5 Flash is 3x more expensive than 3 Flash
$1.5/m input tokens
$9/m output tokens
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u/Solarka45 May 19 '26
That's basically the cost of 2.5 Pro, lol
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u/ilovesleeping247 May 19 '26
They have been making the models more and more expensive. Remember 3.1 flash lite cost was also higher than the older version.
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u/SorosAhaverom May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
The 2.0 Flash released a year ago used to be 22.5x cheaper! $0.40 per million output tokens.
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u/mrmastermimi May 19 '26
I assume they were heavily subsidizing the initial models and compute. they are probably starting to charge closer to actual costs. if this is the case, I only see it getting worse. gotta love the product lifecycle.
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u/iswhatitiswaswhat May 19 '26
where is this? Has it been officially annoucned? Did we get pro 3.5 too?
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u/Dreamerlax May 19 '26
I'm confused, weren't the leaks for 3.2 or they were like "fuck it" 3.5 then.
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u/mtmttuan May 19 '26
3x the price on both input and output and the model is definitely not going to be 3x better than current 3 flash.
And they are definitely going to retire 3 flash as it's not GA yet.
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u/sdmat May 19 '26
This is a disaster for everyone building on Flash, what happened to cheap and good?
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u/BornVoice42 May 19 '26
maybe they move flash to flash lite? dunno
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u/Electrify338 May 19 '26
Pretty much. I think they want flash to be what Claude sonnet is, and pro to be what opus is.
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u/reefine May 19 '26
If Flash 3.5 is as good as Sonnet 4.5 at that speed they cooked
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u/PrathmeshTheBest May 19 '26
It's better than sonnet. Thats what the benchmarks say so far. (Google IO)
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u/ButterscotchSalty905 May 19 '26
What about gemini ultra? Did they forgot about it or treat it like a competitor for mythos?
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u/WildContribution8311 May 19 '26
If Flash Lite becomes what Flash was, it could be acceptable for building on.
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u/AppealSame4367 May 19 '26
Cheap and good is called "Deepseek v4 Flash" now.
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u/sdmat May 19 '26
Well it's certainly cheap.
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u/AppealSame4367 May 20 '26
I've been using it for a week on opencode with OMO Slim. For new features: not so great, but that's the same for Gemini.
For development, debugging, documentation of existing modules: Great.
It makes just as many mistakes as Gemini Flash I'd say. If you wanna plan out complex features or debug complex scenarios, you always need one of the big thinkers.
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u/jonomacd May 19 '26
Cheap and good is a stretch
I think flash was cheap and barely passable.
That's not a bad thing. Barely passable is often all you need but let's not kid ourselves about capabilities.
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u/Familiar_Text_6913 May 19 '26
It was very cost efficient for multimodal tasks. Video explanation for example.
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u/sdmat May 19 '26
I like having a model at that price point, makes a lot of uses possible.
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u/Independent-Tart608 May 20 '26
Flash with reasoning-high or medium was very good, in my experience.
I didn't notice any issues in anything but the most complex tasks. It could do medium-complexity coding, basic answers (talked a bit annoyingly but pro did too...) and could solve when i gave it a few dozen college math/physics problems in one prompt. I didn't push it to its limits though but I think I pushed it farther than the average user.
thinking-minimal was admittedly terrible though.
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u/torontobrdude May 19 '26
Love how the "rumors" people were posting about it being extremely cheap were absolute bollocks
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u/Equivalent-Word-7691 May 19 '26
What's the point if it costs more than 2.5 pro and nearly like 3.1 Pro?!!!
It's not like it will be smarter than Pro nor better than Claude, I struggle to think it's 3/4 times better than Kimi or GLM too
it feels like a butchered project
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u/Valdjiu May 19 '26
source?
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u/vladislavkochergin01 May 19 '26
Google Cloud
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u/Valdjiu May 19 '26
not finding it. do you have a link?
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u/MidnightSun_55 May 19 '26
at this price it better be better than 3.1 pro
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u/douggieball1312 May 19 '26
If this is true, the capped usage limits start to make more sense. Not good news.
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u/ReporterCalm6238 May 19 '26
Let's all pray that the chinese will not abandon us. But I doubt it, the CEO of DeepSeek is a real G.
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May 19 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/space_monster May 19 '26
It is insanely fast - but who really cares? I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people would be happy with an extra second or two of thinking for a cheaper result.
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u/iam_maxinne May 19 '26
Remember, they could simply remove “AI Overview” from search and serve all of us at far more reasonable cost! 🤔😉🤷♀️
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u/Alternative_You3585 May 19 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I enjoy pasta with juice while cooking during the week to explore in a class.
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u/Ken_Sanne May 19 '26
Is that the real limit ? I've been stopping at 200K to be safe, my use case is coding, can I push It to 300K ?
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u/Alternative_You3585 May 19 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
He enjoy sushi with juice while reading in the summer to unwind in a class.
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u/Internal_Answer_6866 May 19 '26
Disappointed 😞
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u/Internal_Answer_6866 May 19 '26
But hold on if it's as good as opus 4.6 or 95% of it it's actually acceptable
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u/Rent_South May 19 '26
I really like google and the models they provide. I really enjoy using gemini 3.1 flash lite in some of my agentic flows.
But I benchmarked Gemini 3.5 Flash that is available in this benchmarking tool and ran it through ~10 of my prior saved evals that I use for model selection decision in production.
So far, it underperformed older Gemini variants on almost every real task I tested
Not saying the model is bad universally. These are my tasks, and Gemini releases often depend heavily on prompt shape. But if you're planning to swap it into a production workflow, I would benchmark first rather than assume "newer = better."
In, this eval it ended way down at 13th place, even though 3.1-pro and 3.1 flash lite are top 1 & 2, its even lower than gemini 3 flash actually. Its 10x more expensive than flash lite for a worse result. Its an avg result of 5 runs so its not a one time fluke. On top of that, this is 1/10 benchmarks with similar outcomes, although admittedly this is one of the worst case, this is a vision test.
I really hope that this is something that will change, because I had high expectations for this model given their previous release. To me it just goes to show that artificial analysis and the likes are complete sellouts.
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u/cashmate May 19 '26
what are is your benchmark testing? "agentic flow" could mean anything, like, is it worse at instruction following between agents?
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u/Rent_South May 19 '26
Fair question. In this post I’m using “agentic flow” loosely, but the screenshot itself is not an agent-to-agent benchmark.
That one is a vision classification eval: image in, strict label out, repeated across multiple runs.
Across the broader set I tested, I also used saved evals for RAG / multi-doc reasoning, structured JSON output, academic reasoning, constraint puzzles, and similar tasks. So yes, some of it touches instruction following and structured-output reliability, but I wouldn’t claim this specific screenshot measures “between agents” behavior.
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u/space_monster May 19 '26
Why are you looking at 'emotion detection'?
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u/Rent_South May 19 '26
Mostly because it is a clean vision classification proxy.
Think photo triage, UGC moderation, support workflows, listing/image classification, that kind of thing. I’m not using it as a claim about “emotion detection” as a product category, just as a simple image-understanding task with easy and harder cases.
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u/space_monster May 19 '26
Bit niche though compared to how most people use it. i.e. text
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u/Rent_South May 19 '26
This is true, but unfortunately, and trust me I'm the first one upset with this, it failed miserably on text only benchmarks I use on my real world workflows evals.
LIke this eval on legal documents classification:
==================================================================================================== LLM Benchmark Results - Best AI for Legal Documents Evaluation ==================================================================================================== Model Provider Avg Score Stability Rec. Temp Pricing Cost* Time Acc/$ Acc/min Completion ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- gemini-3.1-pro gemini 100% (72.0/72.0) ±0.000 0.3 High $0.107 116.21s 674.07 37.17 100.0% claude-sonnet-4.6 anthropic 100% (72.0/72.0) ±0.000 0.3 High $0.122 178.70s 589.00 24.17 100.0% claude-haiku-4.5 anthropic 97% (70.0/72.0) ±0.000 0.3 Medium $0.0136 44.28s 5.15K 94.84 100.0% gpt-5.4 openai 96% (69.0/72.0) ±0.000 N/A High $0.0400 64.66s 1.72K 64.03 100.0% command-a cohere 96% (68.9/72.0) ±2.143 0.3 High $0.0123 35.02s 5.59K 118.06 100.0% gpt-5.5 openai 92% (66.2/72.0) ±6.333 N/A Very High $0.0886 64.52s 746.80 61.57 100.0% gpt-5-mini openai 92% (66.0/72.0) ±2.667 N/A Medium $0.0154 108.28s 4.28K 36.57 100.0% grok-4-1-fast-reasonin xai 91% (65.7/72.0) ±3.333 0.3 Low $0.00362 64.75s 18.13K 60.88 100.0% gpt-5.3-chat-latest openai 89% (64.0/72.0) ±2.048 N/A High $0.0159 32.88s 4.03K 116.79 100.0% codestral-latest mistral 88% (63.7/72.0) ±3.333 0.3 Low $0.000978 12.30s 65.11K 310.67 100.0% mistral-medium-latest mistral 88% (63.3/72.0) ±5.476 0.3 Medium $0.00721 60.48s 8.78K 62.79 100.0% minimax-m2.5-lightning minimax 85% (61.0/72.0) ±0.000 0.3 Medium $0.0170 135.05s 3.59K 27.10 100.0% gemini-3-flash gemini 84% (60.7/72.0) ±2.667 0.3 Medium $0.0173 46.46s 3.52K 78.39 100.0% mistral-large-latest mistral 83% (60.0/72.0) ±2.667 0.3 Medium $0.00332 51.95s 18.06K 69.30 100.0% devstral-latest mistral 82% (59.2/72.0) ±0.000 0.3 Medium $0.00348 31.39s 17.01K 113.17 100.0% gpt-5.1-codex openai 82% (58.7/72.0) ±10.619 N/A High $0.0131 29.54s 4.48K 119.23 100.0% deepseek-chat deepseek 81% (58.3/72.0) ±2.000 0.3 Low $0.000615 56.04s 94.84K 62.43 100.0% gemini-3.1-flash-lite gemini 80% (57.3/72.0) ±0.000 0.3 Medium $0.00229 24.46s 25.00K 140.55 100.0% gpt-5.2-codex openai 75% (53.7/72.0) ±5.000 N/A High $0.0195 29.43s 2.76K 109.49 100.0% deepseek-v4-flash deepseek 70% (50.5/72.0) ±9.333 0.3 Very Low $0.000817 47.05s 61.78K 64.41 100.0% command-r cohere 50% (36.0/72.0) ±10.714 0.3 Low $0.000238 15.78s 151.13K 136.86 100.0% gemini-3.5-flash gemini 21% (15.3/72.0) ±2.667 0.3 High $0.0414 34.20s 369.47 26.84 100.0%Its really odd honestly. It had similar terrible results accross about 10 evals of mine like this.
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u/space_monster May 19 '26
How do your eval results compare with public eval results?
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u/Rent_South May 19 '26
What do you mean ? It is well known that relying on benchmarks such as Artificial Analysis' for your own workflow is a recipe for disaster. The only eval that should matter for anyone, is benchmarking on their own workflows.
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u/space_monster May 19 '26
I'm asking because if your benchmark results are significantly different to public benchmark results, it's probably your benchmarks that are the problem
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u/Rent_South May 19 '26
Yes I understand that this was your opinion, hence my previous answer. When you really use AI models in your workflows, you'll find out that public benchmarks do not matter. What matters is how these models perform on your task, and that's it.
I tested it on about 10 different evals and it never managed to be in the top 3. These are benchmarks on my own workflows, so I trust them to work on my real world use cases.
Of course I would prefer to be able to use a better/faster model when it makes sense, even more cost efficient if possible. But if they perform terribly on these task, there is nothing I can do about it.
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u/space_monster May 19 '26
When you really use AI models in your workflows
I use AI every day in agentic workflows, various models across various domains, and I've never felt the need to develop my own benchmarks
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u/ExpertPerformer May 19 '26
DS V4 Flash costs 1/25th the cost of Gemini 3.5 Flash and if you get caching hits its probably closer to 1/50th the cost.
Even if its 90% of Gemini 3.5 Flash its still significantly cheaper for most applications.
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u/Just_Lingonberry_352 May 19 '26
Title is misleading
You get GPT 5.5 for 2.5 pro money which is insanely good deal
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u/Laucenar May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
I just finished testing 3.5 Flash during a session in which I used it in VS Code (with code base indexing on with a Gemini embedding model), getting it to handle what I thought would be a pretty simple task that would still let it show off it's capabilities: revamping the signup page design for my SaaS.
It did create a fairly attractive design, but it really struggled with actually executing what it told me it had done, and this resulted in a lot of back and forth just to get it to fix the UI layout issues (desktop vs mobile, etc) that it itself created.
Nearly $3 in, we finally got it to a state where things were good and dialed in, including a few other adjustments I requested. For context, $3 is what Flash 3 cost me for big big fixes and overhauls, with multiple adjustments and improvements added along the way.
I feel like Flash 3 would have costed me 1/3 of what 3.5 Flash did for what was really just a simple front end overhaul of signup page.
So yes, 3.5 Flash is blazingly fast at what it does, and that initially impressed me. But, overall I'm not super impressed that it struggled with a relatively simple task that it's predecessor could have likely done for much cheaper.
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u/Laucenar May 19 '26
Another example just now: I asked 3.5 Flash to improve my Admin app's prospecting tools to include more information about potential clients via Google Places API, something it was already using and one of my other apps in the same project was already doing, and after working for a cost of $2.85, it told me it implemented everything but maybe only actually added about 1/3 of the functionality it described.
These two tests are enough for me for now. Back to 3 Flash. Not saying 3 Flash is perfect, but it seems more consistent, and even if it makes mistakes, it's easy to fix at much less cost.
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u/Charming-Comb-4304 May 20 '26
3 flash was doing job for me on Antigravity atleast less complex ones. Now there is no cheaper model so usage is gonna drain superfast.
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u/Hyphonical May 20 '26
On OpenRouter you can enable "flex" service, which halves the cost, but it also lowers the speed and latency.
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u/Lonely-Dragonfly-413 May 22 '26
when current cheap flash models retire, developers will have to either switch to other models or accept the price increase. my guess is other apis will also be more expensive, people will have to switch to open source models. not good for the ecosystem
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u/DK1530 May 19 '26
I already expected it. AI companies are not going to let us enjoy their tool with cheap money. Any company who uses their computing resource will follow this path unless we use our own computing resources.
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u/DigSignificant1419 May 19 '26
Could it be smorter