Google suddenly increased the price of Gemini 1.5 Flash by 98% and claimed the previous one was a "typo"

Google quietly doubled the prices for using the API of their new Gemini 1.5 Flash model.

Previously, a million tokens output costed 53 cents, but now it costs 1.05 dollars.

Google raised the price of Gemini 1.5 Flash output by 98% without telling anyone.

This just a week after announcing the model.

Output goes from 0.53/1M to 1.05/1M.

How can we trust an API that drastically increases its price in a week? lol pic.twitter.com/NiIqqx6zmi

— 𝑨𝒓𝒕𝒊𝒇𝒊𝒄𝒊𝒂𝒍 𝑮𝒖𝒚 (@artificialguybr) May 29, 2024

Interestingly, in response to outrage on Twitter, Google AI product leader Logan Kilpatrick stated that the previous price was just a "typo."

Gemini 1.5 Flash is a small multimodal (capable of analyzing text, video, audio, and images) language model with a 2 million token context window introduced by Google on May 14. At that time, Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs, noted that developers should use Gemini 1.5 Flash if they want to quickly perform tasks where low latency matters (on the other hand, Gemini 1.5 Pro is aimed at "more general or complex, often multi-step tasks with considerations")

Yesterday Google announced that it is increasing the speed limit for Gemini 1.5 Flash to 1000 requests per minute and canceling the daily request limit.