Gemini 3.7 Flash's "half price" is a promotion that runs to December 31; from January 1, 2027 the price is identical to what 3.6 Flash cost.

From the Aug 14, 2026 daily brief

On August 13, Google CEO Sundar Pichai launched Gemini 3.7 Flash himself, three weeks after 3.6 Flash, with a post saying it comes "with an introductory price at half the original cost of 3.6 Flash" (the post). The post gives no absolute price. It also does not say how long the introductory period lasts, or whether the cut applies to input, output or both. We pulled up the official blog and all three questions are answered: the introductory price is US$0.75 per million input tokens and US$3.75 per million output tokens, valid until December 31, 2026; from January 1, 2027 it becomes US$1.50 per million input and US$7.50 per million output (Google DeepMind's blog post). Which is to say: input and output both halved, for four and a half months, and then back to the original. Flash is Google's workhorse cheap tier, and it takes the high-frequency, cost-sensitive volume. Anyone writing "the Flash tier just got half as expensive" into a 2027 unit-cost model has an assumption that expires on January 1.

The blog also supplies what the post entirely lacked: five scores against 3.6 Flash as the control, across the three categories the company itself lists — software engineering, knowledge work, web development. They are FrontierCode 1.1 Main at 43.6% against 34.4%, DeepSWE v1.1 at 65.3% against 49.0%, GDP.pdf at 34.0% against 22.0%, AutomationBench at 30.4% against 17.0%, and WebDev Arena at an Elo of 1588 against 1538. ⚠️ These are the vendor's own scores, and no one outside has replicated them; the last on the list, WebDev Arena, is a crowd vote rather than a fixed test. And the announcement still does not answer the most practical question for anyone who has already budgeted on 3.6: is 3.6 Flash being retired, kept alongside, or repriced?

One rare measurement from the receiving side appeared the same day. Zvi Mowshowitz, whose job is tracking and organising AI progress week by week, replied to the launch news with a single line: "I remember when Google released a model and I would care" (the post). ⚠️ What he is assessing is his own attention, not the model; "because releases have got too frequent" is our inference, and at least three other explanations cannot be excluded. But put the supply side's three-week cadence and the receiving side's professional tracker on the same day and the shape is this: once a release is a routine event every three weeks, "what everybody is talking about" is losing its power as an indicator of importance.

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