Google · AI model API pricing

How much does Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite cost?

The absolute price floor among the majors — previous generation, but unbeatable for bulk output-light work.

Rate card

What that means per month

Standard on-demand rates from Google's official pricing page, last checked 2026-07-28. Text/image/video input rate; audio input bills at $0.30 per 1M. Monthly figures exclude caching and batch discounts. Confirm live pricing before committing.

Where Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite sits on price

At the reference month of 10M input and 3M output tokens, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite costs $2.20, which makes it the 2nd cheapest of the 30 models tracked here. That is 1.3× the price of Qwen-Flash, the cheapest model at this mix ($1.70). Among the 9 budget-tier models it ranks 2nd, behind Qwen-Flash at $1.70.

Cache economics

Cached input on Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite bills at $0.01 per 1M — 10% of its own input rate, against a 10% median across the models here that publish a cached-read price. 2 models discount cached reads more steeply than this. On the reference month, serving 80% of that input from cache takes the input side of the bill from $1 to $0.28, leaving output untouched at $1.20 — which is why a high reuse rate changes the ranking above rather than just shaving the total.

Cache reads only. Writes are billed separately by some providers and are excluded here — see the rate note above for Google's terms. Try it at your own hit rate on the AI cost calculator.

Cheaper alternatives

At a reference workload of 10M input / 3M output tokens a month, these cost less than Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite ($2.20/mo):

• Qwen-Flash $1.70/mo

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite head-to-head