Gemini 2.5 Flash
Google released 2025-06-17 proprietary
No independent quality score.
No benchmark we track has measured this model. That is not the same as measuring it and finding it wanting — we simply cannot rank it, so we do not.
Our take
editorial — not a measurementThe previous-generation cheap Gemini at $0.30/$2.50, still worth knowing because of a pricing quirk the newer models share: audio input is billed on a separate, much higher scale — $1.00/MTok versus $0.30 for text. Any cost model that treats 'input tokens' as one number will understate audio workloads by more than 3x. Otherwise superseded by the 3.x Flash line on capability.
Strengths
- $0.30/$2.50 with a 1M context window
- Mature and widely deployed
- Full multimodal input
Weaknesses
- Audio input billed at $1.00/MTok, over 3x the text rate
- Superseded by 3.5 and 3.7 Flash on capability
- Caching storage fees apply
Reach for it when
- Existing deployments not yet migrated
- Text-only high-volume work at low cost
Avoid it if
- Audio-heavy pipelines — check the separate rate first
- You are starting fresh; use 3.7 Flash
Sources: ai.google.dev
Every price dimension
| Input | $0.300/M |
|---|---|
| Output | $2.50/M |
| Cached input | $0.030/M |
| Cache write | $0.083/M |
| Reasoning | $2.50/M |
| Web search | $0.014/call |
| Batch discount | 50% |
Reasoning tokens are billed separately at $2.50/M, on top of output. On a reasoning-heavy workload this can be 40% of the bill and it does not appear in the advertised price.
Independent scores
| LMArena Elo | 1417.3default |
|---|
Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.
Capability
| Context window | 1.0M |
|---|---|
| Max output | 66K |
| Input modes | file, image, text, audio, video |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | optional |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-01-31 |
| Open weights | no |
Provenance
| Price source | openrouter.ai |
|---|---|
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | unrated |
| Cross-checked | vendor page |
Gemini 2.5 Flash is Google's state-of-the-art workhorse model, specifically designed for advanced reasoning, coding, mathematics, and scientific tasks. It includes built-in "thinking" capabilities, enabling it to provide responses with greater...