Roundup
Best AI Models for Research
Long documents, citations and careful reasoning: the models we reach for when accuracy matters more than speed.
Google: Gemini 3.8 Flash
google/gemini-3.8-flash
Gemini 3.8 Flash is Google's most intelligent Flash model with significant gains from 3.7 Flash across software engineering, agentic tasks, and multi-step reasoning.
Listed (2 Sept 2026)
Source: OpenRouter (live)
- Input
- $0.750
- USD per 1M tokens
- Output
- $3.75
- USD per 1M tokens
- Blended
- $1.50
- 75% in / 25% out
- Context
- 1.0M
- tokens
- Max output
- 66K
- tokens
- Modality
- text+image+file+audio+video->text
Prices as listed on OpenRouter, refreshed every five minutes. Provider-direct prices may differ. Convert to your currency on the AI Tracker.
Capabilities
Declared on the listing
- Tool / function calling Declared
- Reasoning controls Declared
- Structured output Declared
- InputText, Image, Video, File, Audio
- OutputText
Capabilities are read from the provider listing. “Not declared” means the listing does not advertise the feature, not that it is absent.
Why it costs this
Pricing context
- 1.9× median
- Market median blended price is $0.800/M across 417 priced models.
Benchmarks
Where we rate it
- Speed & Value — Fast, inexpensive models for high-volume workloads. Our shortlist of capable small models, ordered by live blended price (cheapest first).Verify on Artificial Analysis
Editorial picks, not scores. We link the public leaderboards we watch rather than inventing an AI HQ rating.
Alternatives
More from Google
$0.750
/M blended
$0.750
/M blended
Google
$1.50
/M blended
$0.750
/M blended
Google
$1.50
/M blended
$0.425
/M blended
Alternatives
Similar price, other providers
$1.50
/M blended
~Google
$1.50
/M blended
Relace
$1.50
/M blended
Nousresearch
$1.50
/M blended
Z.ai (Zhipu)
$1.48
/M blended
Qwen (Alibaba)
$1.56
/M blended
Within ±50% of $1.50/M blended.
Analysis
Related reading
Roundup
Best AI Models for Business
Predictable quality, sensible pricing and vendor stability for everyday writing, analysis and customer-facing work.
Comparison
Gemini vs GPT
Google's Gemini against OpenAI's GPT: context, multimodality, price and where each fits.
Google DeepMind's Gemini and Gemma models. All Google models · Official site
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