Have you ever put off trying a new tool because the price looked scary, only to find out it costs the same as the one you already use?

That is pretty much what happened yesterday. On November 10, Google opened Gemini 4 Carbon, its strongest AI model so far, to all paying developers through the Gemini API. Until then, only a small group of cybersecurity defenders had access through Google's Fairwind Program, after Carbon was first announced on October 28. Now anyone with a paid API key can call it in Google AI Studio and Android Studio, and businesses can use it through Gemini for business.

The catch is the price tag has a deadline. Until November 30, Carbon costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, exactly the same as Gemini 4 Argon, the everyday model Google released a few weeks earlier. From December 1, both prices double to $4 and $20.…