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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

> "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.

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

^ 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,...

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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).

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.

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

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.