A Google employee answered a similar question a year ago — see the thread “Inquiry Regarding Grounding with Google Search Quota Calculation for Gemini 2.0 Flash, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Pro Models in Paid Tier 1” — stating:
“Once you exceed 1500 grounding with Google Search queries in a day, any additional queries will be billed at the standard rate of $35 per 1,000 queries.”
However, the current pricing docs at https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing now show, for the Gemini 2.5 Flash “Grounding with Google Search” row:
“5,000 prompts per month (free, shared across Gemini 3), then $14 / 1,000 search queries”
And https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/google-search states:
“This billing model only applies to Gemini 3 models; when you use search grounding with Gemini 2.5 or older models, your project is billed per prompt.”
For a paid Tier 1 user calling gemini-2.5-flash with the google_search tool in 2026, please confirm:
Q1. Is the free allowance 5,000/month or 1,500/day?
Q2. Is it measured in prompts or in queries? (Specifically for Gemini 2.5 Flash — the /google-search doc says “per prompt” for 2.5.)
Q3. Once exceeded, is the rate $14 / 1,000 or $35 / 1,000?
Q4. Is the 5,000/month free allowance shared between Gemini 2.5 and Gemini 3 models, or specific to Gemini 3 only (as the “shared across Gemini 3” parenthetical might suggest)?
Context: planning a batch job of ~19,000 gemini-2.5-flash calls with grounding enabled. The answer to these questions changes the budget by 1–2 orders of magnitude, so I want to plan correctly.
Thanks!