Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 Pro API Pricing — And It's Not Cheap

In Today’s Issue:

• Google Unveils Gemini 2.5 Pro API Pricing — And It's Not Cheap

• Chinese state media mocks tariffs with AI

Read time: 2 minutes

On Friday, Google announced pricing for its new flagship AI model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, which boasts top-tier performance in coding, math, and reasoning benchmarks. The API costs $1.25 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens for prompts under 200,000 tokens — and rises to $2.50 and $15 respectively for longer inputs, which few other models support. That makes Gemini 2.5 Pro significantly more expensive than rivals like OpenAI’s o3-mini or DeepSeek’s R1, but still cheaper than ultra-premium options like Claude 3.7 Sonnet or GPT-4.5.

Despite the pricing, early developer response has been positive, citing fair value given the model’s capabilities. But with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic all raising prices for their latest flagship releases, there's growing concern that top-tier AI access is becoming increasingly expensive. Google reports that usage of Gemini 2.5 Pro has surged 80% in April, driven by demand from developers through AI Studio and the Gemini API.