Google · AI model API pricing
How much does Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite cost?
Current-generation budget tier — a quarter of Haiku/Luna input pricing.
Rate card
| Input tokens | $0.25 / 1M |
| Cached input | $0.025 / 1M |
| Output tokens | $1.5 / 1M |
| Context window | — |
What that means per month
| Workload | Tokens / month | Cost / month |
|---|---|---|
| Prototype | 1M in · 0.3M out | $0.70/mo |
| Small app | 10M in · 3M out | $7/mo |
| Production app | 50M in · 15M out | $35/mo |
| High volume | 200M in · 60M out | $140/mo |
| Heavy platform | 1B in · 300M out | $700/mo |
Standard on-demand rates from Google's official pricing page, last checked 2026-07-28. Text/image/video input rate; audio input bills at $0.50 per 1M. Monthly figures exclude caching and batch discounts. Confirm live pricing before committing.
Where Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite sits on price
At the reference month of 10M input and 3M output tokens, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite costs $7, which makes it the 7th cheapest of the 30 models tracked here. That is 4.1× the price of Qwen-Flash, the cheapest model at this mix ($1.70). Among the 9 budget-tier models it ranks 6th, behind Qwen-Flash at $1.70.
Cache economics
Cached input on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite bills at $0.025 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 $2.50 to $0.70, leaving output untouched at $4.50 — 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 3.1 Flash-Lite ($7/mo):
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MiniMax M3 $6.60/mo -
GPT-5.4 Nano $5.75/mo -
GPT-5.6 Luna $5.60/mo