Is Gemini 2.5 Flash a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Gemini 2.5 Flash on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
12 undominated of 145 · Oct 6, 2026
As of Oct 6, 2026, Gemini 2.5 Flash is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scores 17.7 higher at the same price, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scores 17.7 points higher than Gemini 2.5 Flash at the same price, $0.850 per million tokens for both.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1417.0
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.850/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1434.7
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.850/M
Gemini 2.5 Flash takes file, image, text, audio, video, returns up to 65,535 tokens from a 1,048,576-token context, and is listed by 7 sellers.
Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: 1 model dominates it and gives up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Gemini 2.5 Flash scores 1417 at $0.850 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | 1434.7 +17.7 | $0.850/M | 0% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| MiMo-V2.6-Pro | 1491.0 | $0.540/M | file |
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1469.6 | $0.238/M | file, audio |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1465.0 | $0.544/M | file, image, audio, video |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1462.5 | $0.182/M | file, audio, video |
| MiMo-V2.6-Flash | 1456.4 | $0.175/M | file |
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Saved decision references
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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