On Friday, Google announced the API pricing for Gemini 2.5 Pro, an advanced AI reasoning model noted for its exceptional performance across various benchmarks in coding, reasoning, and mathematics. For prompts of up to 200,000 tokens, the pricing is set at $1.25 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. This is significant since a prompt of 200,000 tokens is roughly equivalent to 750,000 words, exceeding the length of the entire “Lord of The Rings” series.
For prompts that surpass this token limit, the cost rises to $2.50 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. This new pricing structure positions Gemini 2.5 Pro as one of the most expensive AI models developed by Google, significantly more costly than its predecessor, Gemini 2.0 Flash, which charges $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens. Furthermore, it exceeds the pricing of other leading AI models like OpenAI’s o3-mini and DeepSeek’s R1.
Despite its higher costs, Gemini 2.5 Pro remains competitively priced compared to models like Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, which have significantly higher rates. In the initial response from the tech community, developers seem to view the pricing as reasonable given the capabilities of the model. Overall, there is a noticeable trend of increasing prices for flagship AI models from major companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
The demand for high-quality AI models appears to be driving these rising costs. According to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Gemini 2.5 Pro has become the company’s most sought-after AI model, resulting in an 80% surge in usage on their AI Studio platform and the Gemini API this month.