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Google · language model

Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite: pricing, context and benchmarks

Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite is a language model from Google released on July 22, 2025. It costs $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.4 per million output tokens, with a 1M-token context window. No independent score has been published for it so far.

Score
83/100
Price 25/30
Context 14/15
Features 11/15
Low costReasoningTool calling

What you need to know about Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite

Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite was released by Google (United States) on July 22, 2025. It accepts text, images, files, audio, and video as input and produces text. Its context window reaches 1,048,576 tokens, larger than 93 % of the models in the registry, and it can write up to 65,535 tokens in one go.

It has been available for about 15 months, long enough for its prices and scores to have settled.

Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite pricing

On OpenRouter, Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite costs $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.4 per million output tokens. Counting three tokens read for every token written, its average price is $0.175 per million, more expensive than 18 % of paid models (4.4 times cheaper than the median of $0.76).

A concrete example: a task that sends 2,000 tokens (about 1,500 words) and receives a 500-token answer costs $0.0004. At 1,000 tasks a day, budget $12 a month. The price calculator redoes this with your own volumes.

Tokens already sent and cached are billed at $0.01 per million.

Performance and benchmarks

Epoch AI does not yet publish a capabilities index for Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite. We therefore show no made-up performance rating: only price, context and features count towards its score.

Features, privacy and local use

  • It supports tool calling, so it can drive an AI agent, call APIs or MCP servers.
  • It can answer in an enforced JSON format (structured outputs).
  • It is a reasoning model: it "thinks" before answering, which helps on hard tasks but uses more output tokens.
  • Its knowledge stops at January 2025.

Its weights are not published: it can only be used through the Google API or a broker such as OpenRouter, which means sending your data off your machines.

Other Google models

Average price per million tokens (3 input for 1 output).
ModelReleasedAvg. priceECI
Gemini 4 ArgonOct 13, 2026$4166.5
Nano Banana 2.1Oct 6, 2026$3—
Gemini 3.8 FlashSep 2, 2026$1.65157.4
Gemini 3.7 FlashAug 13, 2026$1.5158
Gemini 3.6 FlashJul 21, 2026$1.5154.5
Gemini 3.5 Flash LiteJul 21, 2026$0.85144.9
Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image)Jun 30, 2026$0.56—
Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image)Jun 18, 2026$1.13—

Verdict

Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite scores 83/100 on our grid, which only uses published figures.

Strengths

  • Low price: cheaper than 82 % of paid models.
  • Very large context (1M tokens): long documents or a whole codebase fit in one request.
  • Agent-ready: tool calling and structured JSON output.

Limitations

  • No independent score published: performance cannot be verified.

Avoid if…

  • your data must not leave your servers.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite cost?

$0.1 per million input tokens and $0.4 per million output tokens on OpenRouter (checked October 25, 2026). A task with 2,000 tokens read and 500 written costs $0.0004.

How big is Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite's context window?

1,048,576 tokens, roughly 786,000 words, with a maximum of 65,535 output tokens.

Can Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite run locally?

No, Google does not publish its weights: it is API-only.

Is Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite suitable for an AI agent?

Technically yes: it supports tool calling and structured outputs. Then check its cost for your volume.

What are the alternatives to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite?

The closest models on price and performance are MiMo-V2.6-Flash, Llama 4 Scout, and Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor.

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Neutrality. No affiliate links. No vendor pays to be reviewed, rated or ranked. Reviews are directed by François Chollet, neutral and factual, and every data point is dated and sourced. How we score