It's super hard to know if those prices are reflective of the true cost.

Remember that leaderboard position is very important, and many leaderboards are perf/$. So, to push the share price up and be top of leaderboards, the company might falsely quote a loss-leading price, and maybe set quotas so people can't cause too big losses.

Here's an evil theory: perhaps they had to really increase the size of Gemini Flash ... because otherwise it would have been close to or maybe even outperformed by Qwen 3.6 27b or something like that.

Hence the cost.