Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite

// Overview

Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite was Google's most cost-efficient model in the Gemini 2.0 generation, built as a cheaper, lower-latency companion to Gemini 2.0 Flash. Google positioned it as a drop-in upgrade from Gemini 1.5 Flash: better quality on most benchmarks at the same speed and cost. It first appeared in public preview on February 5, 2025 and became generally available on February 25, 2025.

Despite the 'Lite' branding, Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite kept the full 1 million-token context window of the Flash line and accepted multimodal input (text, code, images, audio, and video), returning text output. It was aimed squarely at high-volume, latency-sensitive workloads — Google's own example was generating one-line captions for roughly 40,000 photos for under a dollar on the paid tier.

Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite has since been retired. Google deprecated the model and shut it down on June 1, 2026, with the gemini-2.0-flash-lite-001 endpoint discontinued and users routed to newer Gemini Flash-Lite generations (2.5, 3, 3.1). It remains a useful reference point for the 2.0-era price-performance baseline.

// Benchmarks

1. MMLU-Pro71.6%
2. MATH86.8%
3. MMMU68%
4. Global-MMLU-Lite78.2%
5. FACTS Grounding83.6%

Scores on a 0–100 scale (25-point gridlines); higher is better. Each benchmark links to its published source.

// Pricing

Paid-tier rate; a single flat price regardless of prompt size. A free tier was also offered. Model retired June 1, 2026; pricing shown is historical.

Pricing source ↗

// Strengths

• Lowest price in the Gemini 2.0 family ($0.075/M input, $0.30/M output), with a single flat rate regardless of prompt length
• Full 1M-token context window despite the 'Lite' positioning
• Multimodal input (text, code, image, audio, video) for cheap document, image, and video understanding
• Low latency and high throughput, suited to large-scale batch and real-time text generation
• Beat Gemini 1.5 Flash on most benchmarks at the same speed and cost — a clean cost-neutral upgrade

// Best for

• High-volume text generation such as captioning, tagging, and summarization at scale
• Cheap classification, extraction, and routing in data pipelines
• Latency-sensitive chat and assistant features where cost per call matters
• Long-document and multimodal processing on a tight budget using the 1M-token window
• Prototyping and fallback tiers where quality is good-enough but spend must stay low

// How to access

// Gemini Flash-Lite — every version

The full lineage of the Gemini Flash-Lite line, newest first. Every version has its own page — click any to compare specs, benchmarks and pricing.