Google Releases Gemini 3.5 Flash with Significant Price Hike

Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash at Google I/O, skipping the preview stage and moving directly to general availability. The model is being integrated across many of Google's key products, available to billions globally. The model ID is gemini-3.5-flash, with a knowledge cut-off of January 2025, supporting 1,048,576 input tokens and 65,536 output tokens. It lacks computer use capabilities. Google also introduced a new Interactions API in beta, similar to OpenAI's Responses patterns for server-side history management. The pricing for Gemini 3.5 Flash is $1.50 per million input tokens and $9 per million output tokens, making it three times the price of Gemini 3 Flash Preview and six times the price of Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. This approaches the pricing of Gemini 3.1 Pro ($2/$12). Google promises Gemini 3.5 Pro will roll out next month at an even higher price. This price increase follows a trend among AI labs: OpenAI's GPT-5.5 was double the price of GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is about 1.46 times the price of 4.6. Despite the higher cost, Google is deploying 3.5 Flash across free consumer products, suggesting the company is testing price tolerance. Artificial Analysis benchmarks show that running 3.5 Flash (high) costs significantly more than 3.1 Pro Preview. An example SVG generation of a pelican riding a bicycle cost 11 input tokens and 14,403 output tokens, totaling under 13 cents. The announcement was made by Simon Willison on May 19, 2026.