Simon Willison: 'Gemini 3.5 Flash — More Expensive, but Google Plan to Use It for Everything'

simonwillison.net·medium signal

Simon Willison published his analysis of Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash pricing on May 19, noting the model is more expensive than its predecessor despite Google positioning it as a 'flash' tier. His take: Google is betting that frontier-level capability at the flash tier justifies higher pricing because they plan to deploy it as the default across all Google products. This signals the end of the cheap-model-as-gateway strategy.