Gemma 3 12B API Pricing
Google · context window 131K · prices updated 2026-09-15
Where Gemma 3 12B sits on price
At $0.15 per million output tokens, Gemma 3 12B is a budget tier model — 13.9× cheaper than the median output price of $2.08, which puts it in the cheapest 10% of everything we track. It sits 2th cheapest of the 38 Google models we track. Output is only 3.0× the input price, an unusually flat spread: long prompts hurt about as much as long answers, so prompt size is where the savings are.
What real workloads cost on Gemma 3 12B
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a budget-priced model — a $0.15/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill. | $0 | $138 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0 | $1.43 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.0002 | $67.50 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Gemma 3 12B with caching and batch options.
Gemma 3 12B price history
Gemma 3 12B's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 44 days of stability in a market where 78 of the 334 models we track have repriced over the same period, including 6 of Google's own 38 models.
Change-points from our daily price snapshots (tracking since Aug 2, 2026; intraday moves between snapshots are not captured).
Gemma 3 12B vs Qwen3.5-9B
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is Qwen3.5-9B (Alibaba (Qwen)) — priced within a rounding error on output, with $0.05 more per million input tokens. When two models land this close on price, the decision is quality on your own workload, not the price sheet: run 50 real requests through both and compare.
See Qwen3.5-9B pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Google models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Gemma 3 12B API cost?
Gemma 3 12B costs $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.15 per million output tokens and no discounted cached-input tier. That works out to roughly 6,666,667 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the high-volume classification workload cost on Gemma 3 12B?
High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) costs about $0 per request and $138 per month on Gemma 3 12B. Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill.
› What does it cost to fill Gemma 3 12B's 131K context window?
Sending 131K of input in a single request costs $0.0066 at $0.05 per million tokens — before any output. There is no cached-input tier on this model, so every repeat of that context is billed at full price. This is why large context windows are cheap to advertise and expensive to actually use.
› Is Gemma 3 12B worth the price?
Gemma 3 12B is in the cheapest end of the market — cheaper than 97% of the models we track. At this price the question is not cost but capability: it is a good fit for classification, extraction, routing and bulk summarisation, and a poor fit for multi-step reasoning where a wrong answer costs more than the tokens saved.