# How to cut your Gemini API costs

Gemini pricing is aggressive at the Flash tier, and its huge context windows tempt teams into expensive context stuffing. The levers:

## Playbook (in order of leverage)

1. **Model routing & cascades** — Flash and Flash-Lite handle most non-reasoning tasks at some of the lowest per-token prices on the market; reserve Pro for hard reasoning. (https://cutmyaispend.com/methods/model-routing.md)
2. **Context hygiene & token management** — A 1M-token window is not a license to fill it — retrieval + reranking beats context stuffing on both cost and accuracy. (https://cutmyaispend.com/methods/context-hygiene.md)
3. **Prompt caching** — Context caching bills cached tokens at a steep discount for repeated large contexts (docs, codebases, videos). (https://cutmyaispend.com/methods/prompt-caching.md)
4. **Batch APIs** — Batch mode is 50% off for async jobs. (https://cutmyaispend.com/methods/batch-apis.md)
5. **Fix the context & data layer (agent memory)** — If you keep re-uploading the same corpus per session, a persistent memory layer replaces the re-ingestion loop entirely. (https://cutmyaispend.com/methods/fix-the-context-layer.md)

**Pro tip:** Giant-context convenience is the Gemini-specific overspend trap — measure tokens per task, not just price per token.

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