Thread · Developing story

Gemini: pricing, scale and the assistant

Google's assistant at a billion users and falling prices — what the numbers count, and what they leave out.

4 stories · Updated 15 Aug 2026

15 Aug 2026 · Latest Gemini 3.7 Flash Is Half the Price. Until 31 December.

Google's new coding and agent model costs US$0.75 per million input tokens, half what its three-week-old predecessor launched at. The rate is introductory and expires on 31 Decembe...

13 Aug 2026 Gemini Reached a Billion People. Google Did Not Say How Many Pay.

Google's assistant crossed a billion monthly actives on 11 August. The composition is more interesting than the total: about 63 per cent interact by voice, and 150 million images a...

8 Aug 2026 Hassabis Steps Back. The Change That Matters Is a Reporting Line.

Demis Hassabis is no longer chief executive of Google DeepMind. The consequential change is below him: Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes senior vice-president reporting directly to Sundar...

26 Jul 2026 Google Cut Gemini Flash’s Output Price by a Sixth — the Compounding Claim Is Bigger

Gemini 3.6 Flash drops output pricing to US$7.50 per million while input stays put. Paired with a claimed 17% cut in output tokens, the effective saving is closer to a third — if t...