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Comment by damsta | Hacker News Reader

> The model launches today at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens (with cached input tokens at 95% off).

Couldn't you just say what the price will be after the introductory period and when it'll take effect? Do they have some SKILL.md for these blog posts that requires the most important information to always be buried ten levels deep and hidden behind a login page?

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They're doubling the price on December 1st: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-4-argon

$2/million input and $10/million output today. $4/$20 after December 1st.

With the pace they're delivering models, there's gonna be 1-2 new Gemini 4 versions by December 1st, presumably with their own introductory price windows. We just got Gemini 3.8 on 2 September and Gemini 3.7 on 13 August.

This reminds me of telephone commercials that ran back around 1987, saying they were offering long distance calls for 10 cents a minute (a pretty good price back then) and -- this was emphasized, a huge selling point -- they guaranteed your rate would never go up. In retrospect, all the lols :-)

I wonder if that’s more to price in the cost of keeping old models around on expensive inference hardware. It’s not like old models get cheaper to run, and a more heterogeneous fleet is less efficient to manage.

Their last non-flash frontier release was 3.1 Pro back in February. Two new frontier releases at that pace would be Feb 2028.

December 1st is just ~6 weeks away. There's no way Google puts out even 1 more Gemini 4 version before then, let alone more than 1.

No they've been releasing models super rapid fire. Other companies too. 6.1 sol was barely a week after 6.0 sol

Don’t underestimate the power of exponential growth

You're conflating Gemini Flash with Gemini Pro.

Opus 5.5 is also priced at $4/$20, but are they on the same level?

At that price I think you'd pick Opus 5.5.

It's perhaps a face saving thing to pretend you'll charge the same. Let's see if it actually happens.

>$4/$20

Is Elon Musk doing their pricing?

That is the standard pricing for Opus-class models these days.

Blaze it, Robot!

4/20. It is to Musk what 67 is to children.

I think it's more 420 or 4:20 (marijuana reference) than 4/20 (Hitler's birthday).

Although given it's Musk, others may disagree.

There is no such thing as "standard pricing" for products with different performance profiles, architectures, inference costs and infrastructure stack

It is price fixing, nothing else

GLM 5.3 is roughly Opus class and is much, much cheaper

It’s more expensive than 6.1-sol though? At least according to benchmarks.

I think at this point comparing raw token pricing is often apples to oranges.

Those "price per task" benchmarks seem to pre-suppose the existence well-defined requirements and acceptance criteria.

When that isn't available, and the task involves "understanding the problem", "deciding what I'm actually after" etc. iterations, I find price-per-token to still be a better predictor of cost.

Opus 5 class yes, but opus 5.5 is functionally mythos tier

Opus 5.5 class?

No, since that's a moving target. But the large GLM models are likely in a similar model weight class to the Opus family, just a few months behind

No, and anyone who says otherwise is being silly.

It’s still damned capable though, I’ve done a crazy amount of good work with 5.3 Flash.

> Couldn't you just say what the price will be after the introductory period

+1. FWIW, I didn't even get far enough to wonder about the price.

The lead (and only) sentence states "Our next era of frontier intelligence, built to solve your hardest problems" a statement equally true of any new Google or competitor model, hence completely devoid of useful meaning. I then kept scrolling down... and down... and down, giving up after a half dozen screens of big images, huge videos and some customer stories. The first sentence of every text block was equally vague or meaningless so... tv;dr (Too vague, didn't read).

Even the Gemini sub-reddit is laughing: https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1x2dr47/the_lates...

I mean its also been generated by a bunch of PM that want to get promoted but have little idea of what they're talking about..however nobody has been fired YET for using too much vague AI words.

It's irrelevant information, they know the reader switches models every week.

They don’t really. Most normies which are the vast majority of people just use ChatGPT. All tech folk just use Claude.

Normies aren't the target market for Argon anyway. The Gemini app is still serving 3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro.

As of now Argon is available in the android app, at least.

> They don’t really. Most normies which are the vast majority of people just use ChatGPT. All tech folk just use Claude.

It was the case a year ago, but it's less clear cut nowadays, I've seen non-tech people using claude on their phone in the train, and many tech people seem to have switched from Claude Code + Opus to Codex + Sol over the past few month.

Sometimes it seems like ChatGPT and Claude are releasing models every week.

Yeah, then I guess the GP was technically right it’s just people aren’t jumping providers constantly is what I was trying to get across.

Normies are not the target for a frontier model

they are target with 6 month lag. Say, if current Gemini will be demonstrating obviously superior perf compared to Opus, many normies devs will switch within 6 months.

Deva are not normie users by any stretch of the imagination, and they won't switch to a 6 month old frontier model because those will still be as expensive - they'll be using whatever the sub frontier model is at that time

Me, watching the AI world from the sidelines while using DeepSeek at $0.15($0.003 cached)/$0.60 - still bitter about the pricing changes.

It might not be as smart, though my employer gives me access to Claude, so I tried giving the same task to Opus 5.5. Both DS4.1 Flash and Opus5.5 produced nearly identical outputs.

After that, my company switched the entire engineering department to Azure hosted DeepSeek4.1 and costs were cut by 3/4. So far, no one has really noticed the change.

I'm surprised no one's complaining about it randomly switching to mandarin. It seems like no matter what I do once every few days it'll go back to mandarin mid thinking trace and then stays in mandarin until I remind it to use English.

It's just a subtle reminder to learn mandarin, haha

Obfuscating token cost is the new great marketing frontier

They do, just not in that sentence. You must really hate sales ads.

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