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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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 :-)

You're conflating Gemini Flash with Gemini Pro.

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

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

Opus 5.5 class?

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.

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

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

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