Gemini 3.8 OCR Costs

In my recent article on the price and performance of some commercial OCR (optical character recognition) models, I predicted Google’s Gemini 3.8 would cost $35.30 ± $23.70 to convert 1,000 pages containing computer printouts to text. Now, after scanning 5,877 pages, I can adjust this prediction to $34.02 ± $30.82, demonstrating the sample was representative. Details below. Why Gemini 3.8 Flash? In my evaluation, I found Gemini 3.7 and 3.8 to have the highest quality output (i.e. lowest CERiws and WER) of the admittedly limited list of models I tried. Since I ran that evaluation, Google has sunset Gemini 3.7, so I used 3.8 for my research task even though 3.8 had far worse cost efficiency. Gemini 3.8 Pricing Google’s published pricing as of this article’s date, assuming a standard tier API call on or after January 1, 2027 is: Input token: $1.50 per 1M tokens Output and Thinking tokens: $7.50 per 1M tokens Note that there are ways to reduce costs, such as making batch calls (50%…