Basing anything on Google's pricing is folly. Quite recently Google offered several of their preview models at a price of $0.00.
Because they were the underdog. Everyone was talking about ChatGPT, or maybe Anthropic. Then Deepseek. Google were the afterthought that was renowned for that ridiculous image generator that envisioned 17th century European scientists as full-headdress North American natives.
There has been absolute 180 since then, and Google now has the ability to set their pricing similar to the others. Indeed, Google's pricing still has a pretty large discount over similarly capable model levels, even after they raised prices.
The warning is that there is no free lunch, and when someone is basically subsidizing usage to get noticed, they don't have to do that once their offering is good.
Comments
Basing anything on Google's pricing is folly. Quite recently Google offered several of their preview models at a price of $0.00.
Because they were the underdog. Everyone was talking about ChatGPT, or maybe Anthropic. Then Deepseek. Google were the afterthought that was renowned for that ridiculous image generator that envisioned 17th century European scientists as full-headdress North American natives.
There has been absolute 180 since then, and Google now has the ability to set their pricing similar to the others. Indeed, Google's pricing still has a pretty large discount over similarly capable model levels, even after they raised prices.
The warning is that there is no free lunch, and when someone is basically subsidizing usage to get noticed, they don't have to do that once their offering is good.