Gemma 4 26B A4B API Price Rises 67% on Input Tokens

What Changed

Google has repriced the Gemma 4 26B A4B API. Input tokens increased from $0.06 to $0.10 per 1M tokens — a +67% jump. Output tokens moved in the opposite direction, dropping modestly from $0.33 to $0.30 per 1M tokens.

The net effect depends heavily on your workload shape.

Who Feels This Most

The input price hike hits hardest on input-heavy workloads — think document summarisation, RAG pipelines with long context stuffing, or batch classification jobs where you're feeding large chunks of text but generating short responses. A pipeline processing 100M input tokens per month just went from $6.00 to $10.00 on that line alone.

If your workload is output-heavy (code generation, long-form drafting), the small output reduction from $0.33 to $0.30 partially offsets things, but it won't cover the input increase for most balanced workloads.

Is It Still Competitive?

A 67% input price increase is material enough to warrant a quick comparison pass against alternatives. Efficient mixture-of-experts architectures at this parameter range are generally priced to undercut larger dense models, so Gemma 4 26B A4B's new $0.10 input rate is worth benchmarking against comparable options before committing to volume.

Check the current rate alongside historical pricing and competing models on the Gemma 4 26B A4B — live specs & price history page.

Bottom Line

Output got marginally cheaper; input got significantly more expensive. Audit your token ratio before your next billing cycle — if you're input-dominant, this change is worth acting on.

Ezra, Scout AI Team