# Google Gemini API

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/llm-apis/google-gemini/

Hosted inference for the Gemini model family, with a free tier and per-million-token paid pricing.

## Who it suits

Getting to a working prototype without a card, then staying on the cheapest frontier-adjacent rates in this set — $0.75 per million input tokens is well under half what Anthropic and OpenAI charge for their top models.

Consider something else if The rates are dated: they roughly double on 1 January 2027, free-tier content is used to improve Google's products, and rate limits are not published anywhere you can read before signing up.

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Pricing model: Per million tokens, with dated price changes published in advance — the current Gemini 3.x rates are explicitly promotional through 31 December 2026 and roughly double on 1 January 2027. A free tier exists, and its content is used to improve Google's products where the paid tier's is not. ([source](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing), read 2026-09-06)

### Inference

- Input price, top model: $0.75 per million input tokens for Gemini 3.8 Flash through 31 December 2026, then $1.50. Gemini 3.1 Pro, still preview, is $2.00 for prompts up to 200k tokens and $4.00 above. ([source](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Output price, top model: $3.75 per million output tokens for Gemini 3.8 Flash through 31 December 2026, then $7.50. Thinking tokens are billed as output. ([source](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Input price, cheapest model: $0.30 per million input tokens for Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite, with output at $2.50. ([source](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Context window: 1,048,576 tokens for Gemini 3.8 Flash. Read from the Vertex AI model card: the Gemini API docs build their model cards client-side and publish no figure a fetch can read. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/models/gemini/3-8-flash), read 2026-09-06)
- Max output tokens: 65,536 tokens for Gemini 3.8 Flash, and Google counts thinking tokens as output. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/models/gemini/3-8-flash), read 2026-09-06)
- Prompt caching: Supported ([source](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Batch discount: 50% off through the Batch API, which is a paid-tier feature. ([source](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Rate limits: Tied to a usage tier — Free, then Tier 1/2/3 unlocked by cumulative spend — and enforced as requests per minute, input tokens per minute and requests per day. Google publishes no numbers in the docs: limits are viewed in AI Studio and are stated not to be guaranteed. ([source](https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits), read 2026-09-06)

## Compared with

- [Google Gemini API vs Anthropic](https://inetgeek.com/compare/anthropic-vs-google-gemini/)
- [Google Gemini API vs OpenAI](https://inetgeek.com/compare/openai-vs-google-gemini/)
- [Google Gemini API vs DeepSeek](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-gemini-vs-deepseek/)