whats confusing they have different pricing for output. Here [1] it's $5/million output (starting 1st october) and on vertex AI [2] it's $2.5/1 million (starting 7 october) - but characters - so it's overall gonna be more expensive if you wanna compare to equivalent 1 million tokens. It's actually even more confusing to know what kind of characters they mean? 1 byte? UTF-8?

[1] https://ai.google.dev/pricing

[2] https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/pricing