Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
The budget option from the 2.5 line, priced for simple, high-volume tasks. Retains the large context window while keeping cost and latency minimal.
At a glance
Released
Jun 17, 2025
Provider
Google
Context window
1,000,000 tokens
Max output
64,000 tokens
Modalities
Text + image → text
Knowledge cutoff
January 2025
API model ID
gemini-2.5-flash-liteLicense
Proprietary (API only)
Pricing
Standard
Input$0.10 / 1M
Output$0.40 / 1M
A typical 1,500-token prompt with a 650-token answer costs ≈ $0.0004 on the standard tier. Run your own prompt through the calculator →
Best use cases
Cheap classification
Labels and sorts large text volumes at rock-bottom cost.
Data cleanup
Normalizes and tags records ahead of heavier processing.
Simple lookups
Answers short factual and formatting queries at scale.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Very low cost
- Fast
- Large context
Limitations
- Minimal reasoning depth
- No audio or video input
How to test it
- No-code: open gemini.google.com and pick Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite from the model switcher — no API key needed.
- Playground: sign in to Google AI Studio and run prompts in the workbench, then copy the generated code.
- API: create a key in Google AI Studio and call the API (example below).
curl "https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-2.5-flash-lite:generateContent?key=$GEMINI_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"contents": [{"parts": [{"text": "Explain tokenization in one paragraph."}]}]}'