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Comment by npn | Hacker News Reader

> * For 3.6 and 3.7 Flash, introductory price expires on December 31, 2026. Starting January 1, 2027, $1.50/1M input tokens and $7.50/1M output tokens will apply.

this is hilarious. it is not 2025 any more, by Jan 2027 there will be at least 3 newer generation of models (from other provider) released already. nobody would use flash 3.7 at that time.

sure we used to cling to gemini models in the past, demanding 2.5 models to continue to serve, but since google betrayed us with those price hike, people already spent their time making their production pipeline less dependent on google since then.

heck, even now I'm not sure I even care if they cut the pricing even lower. there are too many models with cheaper price and similar performance now.

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> introductory price

They should call it 'face saving pricing after we realized just how terribly did we mis-price the flash 3.5'

> since google betrayed us with those price hike, people already spent their time making their production pipeline less dependent on google since then.

This is my first hand experience. I spent at least $3000 on gemini-3-flash-preview. And exactly $0 total on (3.5+3.6+3.7)

gemini-3-flash-preview is legit amazing and cheap. That's why i spent over 10k on it.

Maybe the business model is to break even on bleeding edge models while making money on the long tail of usage once systems are tuned for a specific model and running in production.

How can system be tuned for a specific model? Model is fungible, often one model strictly greater on both quality and price.

Models are not fungible, if you're building certain types of products on them.

this is becoming less true with every generation of model.

a decent model with a decent harness will determine when the knowledge base is lacking and attempt to fill the holes; thus the good general models can be very easily brought up to speed on niche domains.

You're thinking like an engineer.

Think like a regulator.

Ugh? It is not just the knowledge

Some model are more aggressive by default, some are more verbose by default. To get the result you want for your specific application, you run experiment with prompts and parameters.

Prompts can certainly be tuned to a particular model, where updating the model actually results in worse performance. This is perhaps less true today than a year or two ago, but we have seen this on newer models as well. Typically, the less specific the instructions are, the less it's a problem. But sometimes you really need to get into specifics to get good results. Area of work is code porting and translation.

The business model is to replace the entire human economy.

Think of it this way: you are at an enterprise business. You have a workflow implemented a year ago that is working just fine. Swapping out the model for a new one changes behavior in unpredictable ways. Eventually, you'll do it once cost is low enough, but it takes serious labor to validate this, so you'll wait a long enough time for Google to make money.

it is partly true, but like I said it is not 2025 anymore. models now get released more often, and still have notable progress so they can safely replace the old models while being faster/cheaper. and thank to chinese models the pricing is pretty much stable and affordable now.

and now we have ai agents to automatic migrate the system with new models. in the past we would need to spend hours to design the prompts, then test the output, then write codes to babysitting it. nowadays any ai agent can do it effortlessly.

This is added specifically so you migrate out of those as fast as next models will be available.

I think it's just to signal that prices will go up in the future.

Isn't it a good thing to know about price hikes in advance? If I were building a product around it, I would certainly care.

I think it's meant to make fun of the fact that Google raised prices on their models and people were upset, and this is Google's way of lowering back the price because by Jan 1st 2027, this model isn't going to be used since people will move on to the latest models.

Personally, I feel like Google blundered on their pricing because while I was using the free version of the Gemini harness, they took away most of the free limits and made people move over to their Anti-Gravity harness for no apparent reason. I was about to splurge for a Pro sub since I already used Google for extra storage but putting up limits like they did made me not want to trust they wouldn't do more price shenanigans. Now their models are behind and it seems like they're scrambling.

I think this is a play to get around EU regulation about false sales.

Nobody except corporations who built workflows on top of it and don't care about the price because the developer already moved on and nobody wants to touch it.

What? Jan 2027 is just about four months away. People surely still use models from four months ago today.

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