Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite

Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite was Google's budget tier before the 3.5 generation, released on 7 May 2026 and pitched at the time as frontier-class performance at a fraction of the cost. It is still served through the Gemini API, but it is now a model with an end date: Google's deprecation table gives 7 May 2027 as its shutdown and names Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite as the replacement. Google notes that the dates in that table are the earliest a model might be retired, with notice given beforehand. Its pricing is the one place where it is still, on paper, cheaper than its successor: $0.25 per million input tokens for text, image and video, and $1.50 per million output tokens, against $0.30 and $2.50 for 3.5 Flash-Lite. Audio is the exception and costs $0.50 per million input tokens, where the newer model charges the same $0.30 for every modality. Context caching runs at $0.025 per million tokens for text, image and video and $0.05 for audio, plus $1.00 per million tokens per hour of storage. A free tier covers both directions. The model takes text, images, video and audio in and returns text. Google does not publish a separate specification table for the Lite variants on its public model overview, so this profile does not state token limits or a knowledge cutoff. We keep the profile in the catalogue because the lifecycle matters: anyone who built on this tier in mid-2026 has a migration deadline, and the date is worth being able to look up.

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