Google's embedding pricing shifted its billing unit from per-character to per-token across an earlier generational boundary, blocking a clean price-multiplier comparison

Before Google's current token-priced Gemini Embedding line, its text embedding models billed per character. Google Cloud's blog announcement of new preview embedding models (April 10, 2024) states: "The pricing for our text embedding models is $0.000025/1,000 characters for online requests and $0.00002/1,000 characters for batch requests." Those preview models (text-embedding-preview-0409 and text-multilingual-embedding-preview-0409) preceded the GA text-embedding-004 line, which Google's own Gemini Embedding launch post lists as deprecated on "January 14, 2026" — text-embedding-004 was in turn gemini-embedding-001's immediate predecessor.

Because the unit of billing changed — dollars per 1,000 characters under the Gecko-lineage models versus dollars per 1M tokens under Gemini Embedding — a single launch-to-launch multiplier comparable to OpenAI's clean 5x cannot be computed directly from the two rate cards without an assumed characters-per-token ratio, which neither Google source states. This is recorded as a fact about how Google's billing structure changed, not as a computed price ratio: no such ratio is asserted here, and none should be inferred from these two figures alone.

This methodological gap sits alongside claim-google-gemini-embedding-2-priced-higher-than-predecessor, the adjacent (and cleanly comparable) Google embedding-pricing finding, and speaks to the same question the pair answers: question-embedding-api-price-cuts-across-providers.