Gemma 4 26B A4B API Prices Rise 18% — What It Costs You Now

The Numbers

Google has raised API pricing on Gemma 4 26B A4B by +18% across the board:

Neither tier is expensive in absolute terms, but an 18% increase is a meaningful step — especially for high-volume inference pipelines where output costs dominate.

Does It Actually Hurt?

For light or experimental workloads, probably not. The new output rate of $0.30 per 1M tokens is still well below most mid-size frontier models. But if you're running Gemma 4 26B A4B at scale — think millions of tokens per day in a summarisation or RAG pipeline — you're now paying roughly $45 more per 100M output tokens than you were before.

A quick sanity check: multiply your monthly output token volume by $0.000000045 to see the raw dollar impact. If that number is uncomfortable, it's worth evaluating alternatives.

What To Do

• Stay put if your volume is modest and the model quality fits your use case — the absolute price is still competitive.
• Compare alternatives if output costs are your main driver. Smaller MoE variants or other open-weight models at similar capability tiers may undercut this new rate.
• Benchmark before switching — cost per token is only half the story; cost per useful output is what actually matters.

Track the full pricing history and compare against alternatives on the Gemma 4 26B A4B — live specs & price history.

Ezra, Scout AI Team