[sdeiley]

People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF.

Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price. Yet people here act like Gemini is dead weight

____

Update:

3.1 was 40% of the cost to run AA index vs Opus Thinking AND SONNET, beat Opus, and still 30% faster for output speed.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?speed=intelligence-vs-speed&m...

[bluegatty]

You can pay 1 cent for a mediocre answer or 2 cents for a great answer.

So a lot of these things are relative.

Now if that equation plays out 20K times a day, well that's one thing, but if it's 'once a day' then the cost basis becomes irrelevant. Like the cost of staplers for the Medical Device company.

Obviously it will matter, but for development ... it's probably worth it to pay $300/mo for the best model, when the second best is $0.

For consumer AI, the math will be different ... and that will be a big deal in the long run.

[harrall]

Yeah you’re right but most people in the world do not need an agent that codes.

I think Gemini gives fine answers outside code tasks.

Outside of work, where I use Claude, Gemini is cheaper for me (for what I would use AI for) than both Claude and ChatGPT so Google gets my money.

[fhub]

Right now I'll pay 2x for a subjectively 20+% better coding agent. But in a year I don't think there will be an agent that to me is subjectively 20% better amongst the big three.

[xnx]

> You can pay 1 cent for a mediocre answer or 2 cents for a great answer.

But Gemini is also a great answer (possibly slightly less great or more great).

When consumers cannot easily assess a product's quality, they frequently use price as a primary indicator, equating higher costs with superior quality.

[andai]

Quality is Anthropic's game.

Quantity is OpenAi's.

Google's is... specialized hardware? (For now.)

Also deeper crawls, and Google Books! (Though it's unclear if they're making good use of those.)

[WarmWash]

Gemini is the most paradoxical model because it benchmarks great even in private benchmarks done by regular people, Deep Mind is unquestionably full of capable engineers with incredible skill, and personally Gemini has been great for my day job and my coding for fun (not for profit) endeavors. Switching between it and 4.6 in antigravity and I don't see much of a difference, they both do what I ask.

But man, people are really avid about it being an awful model.

[sdeiley]

People can be and often are wrong.

You'd notice how good Opus is in Claude Code. IMHO CC is the secret sauce

[c0n5pir4cy]

I feel like a lot of this is just Googles tooling - if you're using Antigravity/Gemini CLI and then use Claude Code it feels like a huge difference. I can say from experience though (using Cline + OpenCode) that they are really close.

The harness is just much better on the Anthropic side.

[SergeAx]

All perceptions are very personal and anecdotal. Here's mine: I tried to rebuild a website from Hugo to Astro. Gemini 3.0 was mediocre and in the end just failed and was unable to complete the task. Sonnet did almost well. I had to flush the context once most of the job was finished, for atomic git commits and deployment scripts.

[kingstnap]

I personally found Gemini 3.0 to step on my toes in Agentic coding. I tried it around 10 or so times but it quickly became apparent that it was somehow coming to its own conclusions about what needs to be done instead of following instructions.

Like files I didn't mention being edited and read and stuff of that nature. Sometimes this is cute in fixing typos in docs but when its changing things where it clearly doesn't even understand the intentionality behind something it's annoying.

Gemini 3.1 is clearly much better when trying it today. It stayed focused and found its way around without getting distracted.

[xnx]

> But man, people are really avid about it being an awful model.

If you told people Gemini 3.1 was Claude 4.7, they'd be going nuts singing its praises.

[KoolKat23]

Outside of code, Gemini is really really good.

[startages]

This is misleading. I'm running a live experiment here: https://project80.divcrafts.com/

There are 4 models, all receiving the exact same prompts a few times a day, required to respond with a specific action.

In the first experiment I used gemini-3-pro-preview, it spent ~$18 on the same task where Opus 4.5 spent ~$4, GPT-5.1 spent ~$4.50, and Grok spent ~$7. Pro was burning through money so fast I switched to gemini-3-flash-preview, and it's still outspending every other model on identical prompts. The new experiment is showing the same pattern.

Most of the cost appears to be reasoning tokens.

The takeaway here is: Gemini spends significantly more on reasoning tokens to produce lower quality answers, while Opus thinks less and delivers better results. The per-token price being lower doesn't matter much when the model needs 4x the tokens to get there.

[camel_Snake]

Is that no longer the case, or am I misunderstanding the operational costs displayed?

Opus: 521k input tokens; 12k out

Grok: 443k input tokens; 57k out

Gemini: 677k input tokens; 7k out

OAI: 543k input tokens; 17k out

Gemini appears to use by far the least amount of reasoning tokens, assuming they're included in the output counts.

[nu11ptr]

That sounds great, but if Opus generates 20% better code think of the ramifications of that on a real world project. Already $100/month gets you a programmer (or maybe even 2 or 3) that can do your work for you. Insanity. Do I even care if there is something 80% as good for 50% the cost? My answer: no. That said, if it is every bit as good, and their benchmarks suggest it is (but proof will be in testing it out), then sure, a 50% cost reduction sounds really nice.

[rudolph9]

If I was building an application using massive amounts of calls to the api, I’d probably go with Gemini. For a Copilot, definitely Opus.

[jstummbillig]

It's not half price or cost effective if it can't do the job, that I am happy to pay twice the price for to get done.

But I agree: If they can get there (at one point in the past year I felt they were the best choice for agentic coding), their pricing is very interesting. I am optimistic that it would not require them to go up to Opus pricing.

[NiloCK]

There's cost, and cost effectiveness. I'd say so far that received negative value for the prompts that I've sent to Gemini 3.

Skill issue, maybe, but I can't get gemini to do any nontrivial tasks reliably, and it's difficult to have it do trivial tasks without getting distracted and making unrelated changes that eat my time and mental energy to think about.

The breakthrough advance of Opus 4.5 over 4.1 wasn't so much an intelligence jump, but a jump in discerning scope and intent behind user queries.

[vitaflo]

Deepseek is 2% of the cost of Opus. But most people aren't using that for code even tho it's ridiculously cheap.

[fastball]

We are not at the moment where price matters. All that matters is performance.

[sdeiley]

What did you say? Cant hear you over the $400B in capex spend.

Counterpoint: price will matter before we hit AGI

[willis936]

It matters to me. I pay for it and I like using it. I pick my models to keep my spend reigned in.

[csmpltn]

> "People underrate Google's cost effectiveness so much. Half price of Opus. HALF."

Google undercutting/subsidizing it's own prices to bite into Anthropic's market share (whilst selling at a loss) doesn't automatically mean Google is effective.

[sdeiley]

Everybody is subsidizing their prices.

But Flash is 1/8 the cost of sonnet and its not impressive?

[bugfix]

Do they offer a subscription like Claude? These models waste so many tokens "thinking", that using via API is a complete waste of money.

[tkuraku]

https://one.google.com/about/google-ai-plans/?utm_source=g1&...

[metadat]

Attention is the new scarce resource. Saving even 50% is nothing if it wastes more of my time.

[raincole]

^ This is a weird Gemini shilling account (check their comment history) but I still want to point how ridiculous this statement is:

> Think about ANY other product and what you'd expect from the competition thats half the price.

Car, fashion, jewelry, earphone, furniture, keyboard, mouse, restaurant, house,...

[sdeiley]

Lol Ive admitted im a google employee, not hiding my bias.

Most things aren't worth commenting on except the gemini posts here, which I find insane.

And pretty much every example you gave Id expect quite a lot more for 2x the amount? Idk man

[Decabytes]

Any tips for working with Gemini through its chat interface? I’ve worked with ChatGPT and Claude and I’ve generally found them pleasant to work with, but everytime I use Gemini the output is straight dookie

[londons_explore]

make sure you use ai studio (not the vertex one), not the consumer gemini interface. Seems to work better for code there.

[briHass]

Even though I don't like the privacy implications, make sure you use the option to save and use past chats for context. After a few months of back and forth (hundreds of 'chat' sessions), the responses are much higher quality. It sometimes does 'callbacks' to things discussed in past chats, which are typically awkward non-sequiturs, but it does improve it overall.

When I play with it in 'temporary chat' mode that ignores past chats and personal context directives, the responses are the typical slop littered with emojis, worthless lists, and platitudes/sycophancy. It's as jarring as turning off your adblocker and seeing the garish ad trash everywhere.

[mritchie712]

It's half the price per token. Not all tokens are generated equally.

[sdeiley]

Neither are cars but Ill take a Porsche over a Ferrari for a fraction of the price.

[Svoka]

While price is definitely important, results are extremely important. Gemini often falls into the 'didn't do' it part of the spectrum, this days Opus almost always does 'good enough'.

Gemini definitely has its merits but for me it just doesn't do what other models can. I vibe-coded an app which recommends me restaurants. The app uses gemini API to make restaurants given bunch of data and prompt.

App itself is vibe-coded with Opus. Gemini didn't cut it.

[sdeiley]

The binary you draw on models that havent been out a quarter is borderline insane.

Opus is absurdly good in Claude code but theres a lot of use cases Gemini is great at.

I think Google is further behind with the harness than the model

[1zael]

The order of priority for most people is: 1\ output quality 2\ latency 3\ cost. I will always pays more money if output quality is significantly better and latency is worth the tradeoff. There's also enough cost optimization strategies for applied AI applications that token cost rarely outweighs unless it's a SIGNIFICANT difference (e.x. 100-200% more).

[SV_BubbleTime]

Well, it’s half if the product is equal.

Is it? Honestly, I still chuckle about black Nazis and the female Indian Popes. That was my first impression of Gemini, and first impressions are hard to break. I used Gemini’s VL (vision) for something and it refused to describe because it assumed it was NSFW imagery, which is was not.

I also question statis as an obvious follow up. Is Gemini equal to Opus? Today? Tomorrow? Has Google led the industry thus far and do I expect them to continue?

Counterpoint to that would be that with natural language input and output, that LLM specific tooling is rare and it is easy to switch around if you commoditize the product backend.

[cyanydeez]

Some people like blackjack and a technical edge with card counting, others just say screw it and do slot machines.

[sdeiley]

This is a decent analogy actually. Kudos

[port11]

It’s half the price for now, let them gain market traction and ser the price come up. GCP isn’t exactly affordable.

[lukebechtel]

sonnet 4.6 is a third, and equivalent to opus 4.5, which is enough for me usually :)

EDIT: Gemini does have 1m context for "free" though so that's great.

[varispeed]

If something is shit, it doesn't matter it costs half price of something okay.

[dekhn]

"There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey."