Gemini 4 Hydrogen is live: Google's new everyday model costs $1.50 / $7.50 per 1M tokens, with a free tier and a 1M context

Google released Gemini 4 Hydrogen (gemini-4-hydrogen) on November 12 as generally available on the Gemini API, on the free tier and at $1.50 per 1M input tokens and $7.50 per 1M output tokens on the paid tier. It is also in Google AI Studio and is now the default model for the Antigravity agent in Gemini Managed Agents. ArtificialWatch's radar caught the id and fired its alert at 17:46 UTC.

THE PRICE

Per 1M tokens, from Google's Gemini API pricing page:

• Standard: $1.50 input, $7.50 output (thinking tokens included), $0.075 cached input. Only implicit caching; explicit caching is not supported.
• Batch and Flex: $0.75 input, $3.75 output, $0.0375 cached input.
• Priority: $2.70 input, $13.50 output, $0.135 cached input.
• There is no introductory discount. These are the same prices as the billing SKUs Google Cloud listed at 08:50 UTC this morning.
• Gemini 3.8 Flash, which Google now calls its previous-generation Flash model, costs $0.75 / $3.75 through December 31 and moves to $1.50 / $7.50 on January 1.

SPECS

• 1M-token unified context window. 65,536 output tokens by default, and up to 1M with long decode.
• Text, image, video, audio and PDF in; text out.
• Thinking levels low, medium and high (the default), plus a new fourth level, xhigh.
• Available through GenerateContent and the Interactions API, with Batch, Flex and Priority inference.

GOOGLE'S OWN CLAIMS

• Google says Hydrogen cuts fabricated claims by more than 5x compared with Gemini 3.8 Flash, by flagging missing context instead of guessing, and batches read and search tool calls in parallel.
• Google pitches it to run alone for coding and agent work, or as a faster worker and verifier alongside Gemini 4 Carbon and Argon.
• These are Google's own claims. No independent benchmark has scored Hydrogen yet.

WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW

How Hydrogen scores on independent boards such as Artificial Analysis and LMArena, its knowledge cutoff, and when it reaches OpenRouter, which listed no Hydrogen id at 17:50 UTC. Google has not named a Gemini 4 Flash; Hydrogen takes the everyday slot that Flash held.