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Comment by do_anh_tu | Hacker News Reader

Man I love Gemini models but these kind of pricing increase is just insanse. I have a little product and I have to keep increasing the price and reduce the limits because of this non-sense, and they did not even let us use the old models in near future, so I forced to update to the new model with basically no to little improvement because I don't even need that much. Google if you can read this, it okay to release new models and change the price for them, but please please don't kill the old ones like gemini-2.5-flash-lite, because that all I ever need for my little apps with only few thousands of users.

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Do not base products on models that are not open-weights. Doing it is like building a product on someone else's platform, you are entirely at their mercy, and even when they don't have any reason to hurt you, you are tiny enough that if any policy they want to enact hurts you as a side effect, no-one is going to care.

You don't have to self-host the open-weights model, you just need to be able to source it from multiple providers.

Using the closed vendor models maybe made sense when open-weight models lagged so far behind, but that time is now gone.

I just have no choice. My application was tested and benchmarked against a lot of models, but no model can be in the same league as gemini in term of multi-language support and understanding.

Why don't you just switch to cheaper models? I'm sure DeepSeek is probably enough for you and it's way cheaper. If you want, host your own (or have someone else host) open weight models, I use both embedded and cloud Gemma for some things.

What is your use case?

Have you considered moving to open source / Chinese models?

If gemini-2.5-flash-lite is good enough for your application, you will find even lower cost options with better performance outside of the Google ecosystem.

I can't, my main task for it was translation, and no other models in the world can keep up with the multilang support like gemini models, because, no other company in the world has the multilang dataset like google and there might never be one, because google has been collected the internet data for it search engine since the 90s already. And so much has been lost in the history of internet and I doubt there any other company in the world that can go back in time to get those data back.

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