Google Cloud’s public SKU catalogue lists billing entries for Gemini 4 Hydrogen, a modelGoogle has not announced, at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens for text, when we read it on 12 November. Google’s blogs, its Gemini API models page and its pricing page had no entry for Hydrogen at the time.
By our arithmetic, a million input plus a million output tokens would cost $9 on Hydrogen at those rates, 37.5% of the $24 that Gemini 4 Carbon and Argon cost from 1 December. The $1.50 and $7.50 match what Google’s pricing page lists for Gemini 3.8 Flash starting 1 January 2027.
Business Pill · Usage-Based Pricing
An evergreen Business Engineer explainer on usage-based pricing: paying for work, not for seats. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Gemini or Hydrogen.
The key insight:Google Cloud’s public SKU catalogue lists the unannounced Gemini 4 Hydrogen at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens for text. By our arithmetic, a million-in, million-out mix costs $9, 37.5% of the $24 that Carbon and Argon cost from 1 December, and the same as Gemini 3.8 Flash’s list price from 1 January 2027.
Update, 12 November 2026, 18:30 UTC: Google has launched Hydrogen at the prices reported here.Googlelaunched Gemini 4 Hydrogen on 12 November, and Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis posted on X at 18:11 UTC that Google was “Very excited to release Gemini 4 Hydrogen”. Google’s Gemini API pricing page now lists Hydrogen at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens, the same rates as the Cloud catalogue rows this piece reported at 08:55 UTC. The model id is gemini-4-hydrogen, with a 1,048,576-token context window. Our launch piece: Gemini 4 Hydrogen Launches at 2x Gemini 3.8 Flash’s Price.
Update, 12 November 2026, 16:15 UTC: a developer says Hydrogen was added to AI Studio; Google has not announced it. A developer posted on X at 15:54 UTC that “Gemini 4 Hydrogen has been added to AI Studio”, with a screenshot of what the post presents as AI Studio code, naming a model “models/hydrogen”, a “gemini-hydrogen-playground” example and a documentation address for gemini-4-hydrogen. When we checked between 16:00 and 16:10 UTC, that documentation address returned Google’s not-found page, the AI Studio script served to us without sign-in did not contain the word Hydrogen, so we could not confirm the screenshot, and Google’s models page, pricing page and release notes (newest entry 11 November) had no Hydrogen entry. Neither had the Google or Google DeepMind blogs, nor the X accounts of Google AI Studio, Google DeepMind and Logan Kilpatrick. The Hydrogen prices reported here remain the Google Cloud SKU catalogue rates of $1.50 input and $7.50 output per million tokens.
More on this. On a workload of 1 million input and 200,000 output tokens, Hydrogen’s catalogue rates come to $3.00, by our arithmetic: 1.5 times OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Terra at $2.00, 15 times Claude Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna at $0.20, and 37.5% of Claude Opus 5.5 at $8.00, at each company’s published standard rates: Gemini 4 Hydrogen’s $3 Workload Costs 1.5x GPT-6.1 Terra.
More on this. Our explainer prices each Gemini 4 model on one job of 1 million input and 200,000 output tokens, by our arithmetic: Carbon and Argon $4.00 at today’s rates and $8.00 at the 1 December rates, level with Claude Opus 5.5, and $3.00 at Hydrogen’s listed rates, with Carbon’s and Argon’s context windows and availability: Gemini 4 Models Explained: Carbon, Argon, Hydrogen Prices.
The catalogue shows Hydrogen entries for text, image, audio and video. Standard input is listed at $1.50 per million tokens for text, image and audio, and standard output for text at $7.50. Cached input is listed at $0.075 per million tokens for each of the four types.
The catalogue also lists tiered rates. Flex input for text and image is $0.75 per million tokens, and batch output for text is $3.75, half the standard rate by our arithmetic. Priority input for image, audio and video is $2.70, or 1.8 times standard. Every Hydrogen row is listed as global.
A listing is a billing entry, not a launch. The catalogue gives no description of the model, no release date and no benchmark results, and does not say who can use it today.
Cost of one million input plus one million output text tokens at the standard paid rate. Gemini 4 Hydrogen at the $1.50 input and $7.50 output listed in Google Cloud’s SKU catalogue (Google has not announced the model); Gemini 3.8 Flash, Carbon and Argon from Google’s Gemini API pricing page, with their scheduled dates. Totals and the 37.5% share are our arithmetic.Gemini 4 Hydrogen input prices per million tokens by tier, as listed in Google Cloud’s public SKU catalogue on 12 November 2026. Priority is listed for image, audio and video rows, flex for text and image. Google has not announced the model.
How It Compares With Carbon and Flash
Google’s Gemini API pricing page lists Gemini 4 Carbon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through 30 November, then $4 and $20 starting 1 December. The same catalogue already lists Gemini 4 Argon at $4 input and $20 output, and Carbon text output at $20. We covered the scheduled doubling in our Carbon launch piece.
The pricing page calls Gemini 3.8 Flash “Our most intelligent Flash model” and lists it at $0.75 input and $3.75 output through 31 December, then $1.50 and $7.50 starting 1 January 2027. By our arithmetic, Hydrogen’s listed rates are twice 3.8 Flash’s current paid rates and the same as its 2027 rates.
On the same million-in, million-out mix, Carbon and Argon from 1 December cost about 2.7 times Hydrogen’s listed rate, by our arithmetic. Carbon’s cached input is listed at $0.20, against $0.075 for Hydrogen.
What Was Known Before
On 11 November we reported that Google is testing Gemini Hydrogen, after Business Insider said, citing an internal message, that Google staff were testing a model a Google engineer described as “very capable, fast and efficient”. An employee likened it to “Google’s previous Flash models”. That report gave no price, and Google declined to comment.
Tracker accounts on X pointed to the catalogue listing on the morning of 12 November. We treat those posts as leads only; the prices in this piece come from Google’s own catalogue page.
The Structural Read
As we read the catalogue, Hydrogen’s standard rates sit exactly on the Flash line of Google’s price list as it will stand in January, not on the frontier line of Carbon and Argon.
Some posts on X cited $0.75 input, $3.75 output and $0.0375 cached input. In the catalogue those figures are the flex, batch and contributor rows; the standard rows are $1.50, $7.50 and $0.075.
Google, Gemini Developer API pricing page, on Gemini 3.8 Flash, read 12 November 2026
“Our most intelligent Flash model, engineered for long-horizon software engineering, autonomous agents, and complex enterprise workflows.”
Three Implications
FOR DEVELOPERS The catalogue lists Hydrogen flex input at $0.75 and batch text output at $3.75 per million tokens, half the standard rates by our arithmetic.
FOR THE PRICE LADDER Google’s pricing page lists Carbon and Argon at $4 input and $20 output from 1 December, and 3.8 Flash at $1.50 and $7.50 from 1 January 2027.
FOR THE LAUNCH Google has not announced Hydrogen; the catalogue gives no description, release date or availability.
The framework says the token “is simultaneously the unit of cognition the model produces, the unit of compute the data center serves, the unit of price the lab charges, and the unit of value the enterprise extracts.”
As we read it, a catalogue row is where that unit of price is set: Google lists Hydrogen’s text tokens at $1.50 in and $7.50 out per million, against $4 and $20 for Carbon from 1 December. The framework predates the listing and does not discuss Hydrogen.
What Is Not Established
Google has not announced Hydrogen, given it a public description or said when it will be available. The catalogue does not say whether the $1.50 and $7.50 are launch prices, introductory prices or rates that will change, and Carbon’s own launch came with a scheduled doubling.
The catalogue does not say on which Google products Hydrogen is offered, such as the Gemini API, Vertex AI or the Gemini app, or whether it has a free tier as 3.8 Flash does. We did not contact Google for this piece.
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Google Cloud’s SKU catalogue lists the unannounced Gemini 4 Hydrogen at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens for text. By our arithmetic that is $9 per million-in, million-out mix, 37.5% of Carbon’s $24 from 1 December and level with 3.8 Flash’s 2027 price.
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A note on sourcing. We read the Gemini 4 Hydrogen, Argon and Carbon rows of Google Cloud’s public SKU catalogue and Google’s Gemini API pricing page on 12 November 2026 between 08:40 and 09:00 UTC, and checked Google’s Gemini models page and its AI and Gemini blog feeds for a Hydrogen entry. X posts by model-tracker accounts were our leads only. The Business Insider details come from our 11 November piece. Totals, shares and ratios are our arithmetic. We did not contact Google.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
