Why is Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B one of the cheapest frontier APIs available?
For prompts up to 128K tokens, Google prices Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B at just $0.0375 per 1M input tokens ($0.01/1M cached) and $0.15 per 1M output tokens—roughly 4x cheaper than GPT-4o mini—plus a generous free tier in Google AI Studio.