Google: Gemini 3 Pro Preview API Price, Cost Calculator & Specs

At $2/1M input and $12/1M output, Gemini 3 Pro Preview commands a premium price that only makes sense when you're actually using its multimodal capabilities. If you're just processing text, you're wasting money—Gemini 2.5 Flash at $0.30/$2.50 delivers comparable text performance for a fraction of the cost.

The real value here is multimodal reasoning. This model can process images, audio, video, and text together, then generate coherent responses. That's not just a nice-to-have feature—it fundamentally changes what your application can do.

Multimodal vs Text-Only Cost Reality:

• Text-only tasks: Use Gemini 2.5 Flash (save 85% on input, 79% on output)
• Image analysis + text response: Worth the premium if image processing is core to your product
• Video content analysis: Only viable for high-value use cases (medical imaging, legal document review)
• Audio transcription + analysis: Consider OpenAI'sWhisper API separately for better cost efficiency

When It Actually Makes Business Sense:

Document Intelligence Systems: Process invoices with images, extract data, generate reports—all in one pipeline. The $0.008/image fee plus token costs beats hiring a human for complex document analysis.

Visual Quality Assurance: E-commerce platforms can analyze product images for quality issues, extract specifications, and flag problems automatically. A single prevented return justifies weeks of API costs.

Medical/Legal Document Review: When dealing with scanned medical records or legal documents containing images, charts, or diagrams, the multimodal processing eliminates the need for separate OCR and analysis steps.

Educational Content Analysis: Platform analyzing student submissions that include handwritten work, diagrams, or recorded explanations. The multimodal understanding provides context text-only models miss.

The key question: Does your use case fundamentally require processing multiple media types together? If yes, this premium pricing is justified. If you're just doing text with occasional images, switch to text-optimized models and save money.