Overview
The gemini 3.5 flash model is the full, non-Lite Flash model in Google's Gemini 3 lineup — the version to reach for when a task needs more consistency than the Lite models offer but doesn't need a frontier-tier price tag. It's a fit for production agents, document-heavy RAG systems, and coding assistants where reliability on harder prompts matters more than shaving pennies off every call.
Token economics
The numbers here are the highest in this comparison: $1.50 per million input tokens and $9.00 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.15 per million tokens. That output price is notably steeper than its own successor, Gemini 3.6 Flash, which charges $7.50 per million output tokens at the same input rate — worth noting if you're choosing between the two for a new build rather than maintaining an existing integration on 3.5 Flash.
A 1,048,576-token context window and 65,536-token output cap match the rest of the Gemini 3 family, so the pricing difference isn't buying extra room — it's paying for whatever changed under the hood between generations.
Modalities and reasoning
Input covers text, image, video, audio, and PDF; output is text only. Function calling and reasoning are both supported, which makes this a reasonable choice for agentic workflows that need to plan across multiple tool calls rather than just answer a single question.
- Context window: 1,048,576 tokens
- Max output: 65,536 tokens
- Input: $1.50 per million tokens
- Output: $9.00 per million tokens
- Cached input: $0.15 per million tokens
- Knowledge cutoff: January 2025
How it stacks up next to 3.1 Flash Lite and 3.6 Flash
Against Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite ($0.25 / $1.50), Gemini 3.5 Flash costs six times as much per input token and six times as much per output token — a jump that only makes sense if your task is actually hitting the Lite model's limits. Against Gemini 3.6 Flash, the newer full-size model in the family, 3.5 Flash charges the same for input but 20% more for output, which makes 3.6 Flash the more cost-efficient pick for new projects with similar quality needs.
Limitation worth knowing
The knowledge cutoff sits at January 2025, so for anything time-sensitive — recent events, current pricing elsewhere, newly released libraries — pairing this model with retrieval or search tools is safer than trusting it to know what happened since. Its capability score (89.0) is also a touch below the two newer models in this lineup (89.4 each), so it's worth testing against Gemini 3.6 Flash directly before committing to 3.5 Flash for a new integration.