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Public story · 2026-09-12 · high
The upgrade path is Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.6 Flash at higher list prices, and one migration reported regressions.
Why now: Google's October 16 cutoff is five weeks away, leaving teams still on 2.5 with a short window to test the replacements.
Google will retire gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-2.5-flash on October 16, 2026, a date pushed back from an original June cutoff. The listed upgrades, Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.6 Flash, cost more on the price list. Teams relying on 2.5 Pro for long-document work don't get a simple swap.
The specific loss, per a Hacker News thread on the change, is 2.5 Pro's document handling. One poster says it fits thousand-page inputs into about 300,000 tokens, and that no competitor matches that at comparable pricing. If true, matching it requires more than picking a newer model number.
A second commenter in the same thread reports regressions after moving workloads to the 3.x Flash line, without naming which workloads or what broke. One report isn't a benchmark. Anyone running similar work on 2.5 Flash should test 3.6 against real inputs before the cutoff.
The thread pulled only 19 points, small enough to read as an early warning rather than a wave of migration complaints. Two months is the entire notice period Google gave for a hosted model with no same-tier replacement listed.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
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