Google's newest embedding model, Gemini Embedding 2, launched priced higher per token than its predecessor, not lower

Google's gemini-embedding-001 launched July 14, 2025 priced at $0.15 per 1M input tokens, per the Google Developers Blog announcement: "The Gemini Embedding model is priced at $0.15 per 1M input tokens." The same post sets its own deprecation timeline for the two models it replaced — embedding-001 (August 14, 2025) and text-embedding-004 (January 14, 2026) — confirming it as a direct successor generation, not a parallel offering.

The next generation, Gemini Embedding 2, reached general availability April 30, 2026 and launched priced higher. Google's own Gemini API pricing page lists the paid standard-tier text-input rate for "Gemini Embedding" at $0.15 per 1M tokens against "Gemini Embedding 2" at $0.20 per 1M tokens — a ~33% increase across the generational boundary. Google's developer blog post introducing the new model, "Building with Gemini Embedding 2," notes the Batch API "achieves much higher throughput at 50% of the default embedding price," consistent with a $0.20/$0.10 standard/batch split.

This is the direct counter-example to claim-openai-embedding-price-fell-5x-ada-002-to-3-small, which found a clean 5x cut across OpenAI's ada-002 → text-embedding-3-small transition. It answers the provider-generality half of question-embedding-api-price-cuts-across-providers: at least one other major embedding vendor's most recent launch-to-launch transition moved the opposite direction from OpenAI's. Gemini Embedding 2 is also Google's first natively multimodal embedding model, so the increase may in part be pricing a materially different capability rather than a straight like-for-like markup — a distinction this note does not resolve.