Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite

Google's budget multimodal workhorse — one of the cheapest capable APIs anywhere, still top-16 on OpenRouter by usage. Takes text, image, video and audio input with 1M context and very low latency. LEGACY: Google has scheduled Gemini API retirement for October 16, 2026 (it remains available on Vertex AI) — plan migrations accordingly.

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite strengths

• Ultra-low cost multimodal API
• 1M context at budget pricing
• Very low latency
• Proven at massive scale
• Optional lightweight thinking mode

Pricing & context

Cost guide: a typical call of about 10K input + 2K output tokens costs roughly $0.002 at list prices. Worth modelling against cheaper tiers before committing high-volume traffic.

When to choose Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is best for high-volume classification, summarization, extraction and simple chat at scale (note the Oct 2026 Gemini API retirement). If your workload is more cost-sensitive, weigh it against gpt-oss-120b (≈$0.03 input /1M) first.

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite FAQ

How much does Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite cost?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is priced at $0.10 per 1M input tokens and $0.40 per 1M output tokens (public API list price), with a 1M tokens (~64K output) context window. A typical call of about 10K input and 2K output tokens costs roughly $0.002.

What is Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite best for?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite by Google is best for high-volume classification, summarization, extraction and simple chat at scale (note the Oct 2026 Gemini API retirement).

How does Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite pricing compare to Amazon Nova Premier?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite input costs $0.10 per 1M tokens versus $2.50 for Amazon Nova Premier, roughly 25.0x less expensive on input. Output is $0.40 vs $12.50.

Is Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite multimodal?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite supports text, image, video, audio.

Tools that use Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite