Is Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite a good deal?

Whether anything in this catalogue beats Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite 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, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores higher and costs less than Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite for Balanced on LMArena, but it is not a drop-in. You would give up: file.

Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements

Current model

Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite

Balanced

3 tokens in per 1 out

MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 56.3 points higher and costs 36% less, but you would give up: file.

Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite

LMArena Elo · higher is better

Scale starts at 1040 Elo

1434.7

Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better

$0.850/M

MiMo-V2.6-Pro

LMArena Elo · higher is better

Scale starts at 1040 Elo

1491.0

Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better

$0.540/M

Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite takes text, image, video, file, audio, returns up to 65,536 tokens from a 1,048,576-token context, and is listed by 8 sellers.

Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: nothing dominates it outright, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite scores 1434.7 at $0.850 per million tokens for this mix.

Higher score, lower price, named losses

Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.

ModelLMArenaEffective $/MYou give up
MiMo-V2.6-Pro1491.0$0.540/Mfile
GLM 5.3 Flash1469.6$0.238/Mfile, audio
MiMo-V2.5-Pro1465.0$0.544/Mimage, video, file, audio
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash1462.5$0.182/Mvideo, file, audio
MiMo-V2.6-Flash1456.4$0.175/Mfile
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite1434.7 · $0.850/MLMArena EloEffective $/M · Balanced
145 rated, priced standard models. Chartreuse is the frontier. Cobalt is the model you named, when it is not on the staircase.

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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.

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