What people seem to miss very hard is that they get interactive chat mode of all the models, including the best and newest (Gemini 2.5 Pro, 2.5 Flash, 2.5 Flash Lite and older) totally for free. I mean when working from chat at https://aistudio.google.com/ the entire 1M context window and all is totally free of charge. You really get a very good AI for nothing.
Funny you mention this, I literally just got done loading the context window of AI studio up for an hour doing some prototyping and then was frustrated when I couldn’t see where I was at from billing (knew it couldn’t be that much, but I still like to know).
I assumed because I’m on paid tiers it would still cost behind a certain usage amount, but I guess not.
https://i.imgur.com/pgfRrZY.png