Gemini 4 Argon
How much does Gemini 4 Argon cost?
Gemini 4 Argon costs $2.00 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens on Google's own API. Input read from the prompt cache costs $0.10 per million tokens. This price runs until November 30, 2026; after that it becomes $4.00 / $20.00. Checked against Google's pricing page on October 19, 2026.
- Input Price
- $2.00
- per 1M tokens
- Output Price
- $10.00
- per 1M tokens
- Context Window
- 1.0M
- tokens
- Speed Score
- 70
- out of 100
Benchmarks
Avg 97/100- Coding98/100
- Reasoning98/100
- Extraction96/100
- Creative96/100
- Vision98/100
Pricing
Input
Prompt / context tokens
$2.00/ 1M
Output
Generated tokens
$10.00/ 1M
Batch API
Async processing discount
$1.00 / $5.00
50% off standard price
List price from the Google pricing page, verified October 19, 2026.
Introductory price until November 30, 2026; $4.00 / $20.00 from the day after.
Check the sourceBest For
Gemini 4 Argon in context
On a typical 70% input / 30% output mix, Gemini 4 Argon blends to $4.40 per million tokens. That puts it above 55% of the 47 models tracked here, and 3 other models in the same flagship 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 $2.00 per million and output $10.00 — 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 — coding leads at 98/100 but only 2 points separate the strongest category from the weakest. That makes Gemini 4 Argon 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 70/100. 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 flagship-tier model, judge the speed score against what you are doing: it decides everything for interactive chat and almost nothing for overnight batch work.
Nothing cheaper in the table matches Gemini 4 Argon on combined coding and reasoning, so its $4.40 blended price is buying capability you cannot get for less right now. That is the case for paying it — and it is worth re-checking, because this is exactly the position that a new release takes away.
The closest comparison is GPT-5.6 Sol from OpenAI, at $8.80 per million against $4.40. 5 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 4 Argon runs about $40.00. Routing the latency-tolerant share through the batch API at 50% off would bring that to roughly $20.00, 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 4 Argon |
|---|---|
| List price (input / output) | $2.00 / $10.00 |
| Cached input | $0.105% 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 | $0.48 |
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
- #1 on the Vals Index at launch (68.9%)
- 1M-token context, with output up to 1M tokens through long decoding
- 50% Batch API discount
Avoid For
- Budgets that must hold into December — the price doubles to $4 / $20 on 1 December 2026
- Free-tier experiments: Google does not offer it on the free tier