Is Gemini 3.6 Flash a good deal?

Whether anything in this catalogue beats Gemini 3.6 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, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores higher and costs less than Gemini 3.6 Flash 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 3.6 Flash

Balanced

3 tokens in per 1 out

MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 11.5 points higher and costs 64% less, but you would give up: file.

Gemini 3.6 Flash

LMArena Elo · higher is better

Scale starts at 1040 Elo

1479.5

Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better

$1.50/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 3.6 Flash takes text, image, video, file, audio, returns up to 65,536 tokens from a 1,048,576-token context, and is listed by 7 sellers.

Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: nothing dominates it outright, 1 more dominates it but gives something up. Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 1479.5 at $1.50 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
Gemini 3.6 Flash1479.5 · $1.50/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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