What's this about?
Gemini 3.8 Flash costs the same as 3.7: $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output. dotey's analysis flags the footnote — this is an introductory price that expires at the end of 2026, after which it doubles to $1.50 and $7.50.
Why does the footnote matter more than the headline?
Because people build cost models on today's price and deploy on a horizon longer than four months. A doubling is not a rounding error: any workload sized against $0.75 becomes a different business decision at $1.50, and by then you have written the integration. This is a standard tactic and it is disclosed — the problem is that the disclosure lives in a footnote while the number lives in the headline.
Why is it worth noticing?
- The expiry is roughly four months away, which is inside most procurement cycles.
- It sits alongside the week's other pricing subtleties: Anthropic's cheaper cache reads that do not change subscription metering, and the "20×" that is per-window.
- Every pricing story this week has the same shape — the headline number is true and describes something narrower than it appears to.