Gemini 3.8 Flash
How much does Gemini 3.8 Flash cost?
Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens on Google's own API. Input read from the prompt cache costs $0.075 per million tokens. This price runs until December 31, 2026; after that it becomes $1.50 / $7.50. Checked against Google's pricing page on October 12, 2026.
- Input Price
- $0.75
- per 1M tokens
- Output Price
- $3.75
- per 1M tokens
- Context Window
- 1.0M
- tokens
- Speed Score
- 95
- out of 100
Benchmarks
Avg 91/100- Coding90/100
- Reasoning91/100
- Extraction92/100
- Creative88/100
- Vision94/100
Pricing
Input
Prompt / context tokens
$0.75/ 1M
Output
Generated tokens
$3.75/ 1M
Batch API
Async processing discount
$0.375 / $1.875
50% off standard price
List price from the Google pricing page, verified October 12, 2026.
Introductory price until December 31, 2026; $1.50 / $7.50 from the day after.
Check the sourceBest For
Gemini 3.8 Flash in context
On a typical 70% input / 30% output mix, Gemini 3.8 Flash blends to $1.65 per million tokens. That puts it above 30% of the 46 models tracked here, and 13 other models in the same budget tier undercut it. Tier is a capability label, not a price band — the spread inside one tier is often wider than the gap between tiers, which is why picking by tier alone tends to overspend.
Input runs $0.75 per million and output $3.75 — a 5.0x ratio. That ratio matters more than either number on its own: a summarisation or classification workload reads far more than it writes and will track the input price, while a code-generation or long-form writing workload inverts that and will track the output price. Compare models on the ratio your own traffic actually has, not on the input price alone.
The benchmark profile is unusually flat — vision leads at 94/100 but only 6 points separate the strongest category from the weakest. That makes Gemini 3.8 Flash a safe default for mixed workloads where you cannot predict in advance which capability a request will lean on, and a poor choice if you need a specialist.
The context window is 1.05M tokens and the throughput score is 95/100. Context only earns its keep if you fill it, and filling it is also what makes a request expensive — a large window is an option, not a discount. For a budget-tier model, judge the speed score against what you are doing: it decides everything for interactive chat and almost nothing for overnight batch work.
Worth checking before you commit: Claude Haiku 5.5 scores at least as well on combined coding and reasoning and blends to $0.22 per million against Gemini 3.8 Flash's $1.65. That does not make Gemini 3.8 Flash the wrong choice — context window, latency, vendor lock-in, and specific capabilities all sit outside a benchmark score — but it does mean the price difference needs a reason behind it.
The closest comparison is Claude Haiku 5.5 from Anthropic, at $0.22 per million against $1.65. 1 models in this tier score higher on combined coding and reasoning, which is the useful framing: the question is rarely whether a model is good, it is whether it is the cheapest thing that is good enough for the specific work you are sending it.
What it costs in production
At 10M + 2M tokens a month — a realistic mid-size production workload — Gemini 3.8 Flash runs about $15.00. Routing the latency-tolerant share through the batch API at 50% off would bring that to roughly $7.50, which is usually a bigger saving than switching models.
What you actually pay
The list price is only the start. Prompt caching, batch processing and long prompts change the bill, and each provider sets them differently. Prices per 1M tokens.
| Pricing term | Gemini 3.8 Flash |
|---|---|
| List price (input / output) | $0.75 / $3.75 |
| Cached input | $0.07510% of the input price |
| Batch API | 50% off input and output |
| Long prompts | No surcharge across the 1.05M window |
| Input with 80% cache hits | $0.21 |
The last row assumes 80% of input tokens are read from the cache, as in a chat app that re-sends a long system prompt or RAG over the same documents. Cache-write and storage charges are not included.
Gemini also bills cache storage by the hour.
Checked on October 8, 2026 against the pricing pages of Google.
Price History
No price changes since launch
Strengths
- Accepts image, audio and video input
- 1M-token context
- 50% Batch API discount
Avoid For
- Budgets that must hold into 2027 — the price doubles to $1.50 / $7.50 on 1 January