[hijodelsol]

It's discouraging to see Google price Gemini 3.5 Flash at 3x the cost of Gemini 3 Flash. I would think that most people that deployed this model in production would have used it for low latency tasks, classification/categorization, customer support or basic RAG-/RAG-style chatbots. Performance on coding benchmarks is nice and all, but where is the "intelligence too cheap to measure"? This new cost point is quite prohibitive and will eat up a lot of margins if developers adopt it.

[ai_fry_ur_brain]

Expect all models to increase in price 3x with new releases. They're easing us into the margins they're targeting.

Flash 3 wasnt appropriately priced, it was priced to get you used to a certain level of spending, then they'll crank it up and get you used to the next level of spending.

[hijodelsol]

I am aware that it was likely subsidized or at least did not have appropriate margins. But over time, that same capability should become profitable if parameter efficiency and chips improve. For many customer facing use cases outside of coding assistants, optimizing for speed, basic logic/maths and conversational texts matters much more than being able to use 40 tools simultaneously. I would have hoped that Google would recognize this and keep a dual line up, where Pro and Flash are clearly intended for different market segments. But it seems, it's all in on coding assistants and screw the other use cases..

Now, we might need to change to DeepSeek 4 Flash if Google deprecates 3 Flash.

[parliament32]

Has your AWS bill gone down in the last decade? Despite "efficiency" and chip improvements?

Why would you expect text-generator-as-a-service to be any different?

[hijodelsol]

When using Hetzner, DigitalOcean or any other VPS service together with Cloudflare, I can handle millions of page views for 5-50$ a month at pricing that has stayed nominally the same for a long time and due to inflation and performance gains of the underlying chips has basically become cheaper.

[dist-epoch]

Is Gemma 4 31B not enough for your simple tasks?

[hadlock]

I guess you didn't get the memo from last month: Loss leader pricing is over, you're now paying a less subsidized price, and will continue to until it's profitable

[hijodelsol]

As explained in another comment, I think this is more about Google orienting Flash towards more complex use cases. If we got minor improvements vs 3 Flash with 1.5x the price so they can optimize their margin (which on such small models for conversational tasks is a completely different stories than the 3-25x subsidies that these agentic coding plans offer) I would have been happy. Or even no change at all. But knowing Google, I now must fear that they will deprecate 3 Flash without offering any realistic option for that user facing chatbot segment that does not require multi-tool use across 500k context.

[simianwords]

Gemini 3.5 flash beats Gemini 3.1 pro at all benchmarks.

[sdeiley]

No it doesn't. Look at artificial analysis.

But it's very competitive and significantly faster