Gemini image batch is half price: what that means for Sume users

Google's Gemini API page lists Gemini 3.1 Flash Image at $0.50 input and $60.00 output per million tokens on the standard tier and $0.25 and $30.00 on the batch tier, exactly half. Sume's docs describe no batch discount: you pay the endpoint's price line, reserved at submit, whether you submit one image or a thousand.

What does Google's batch tier change?

The page shows standard output at $60.00 per million tokens and batch output at $30.00. The per-image figures it lists (about $0.067 at 1K, $0.101 at 2K) are standard. Since batch halves the token rates, the same 1K image works out to roughly $0.034 in batch, by arithmetic on the listed tokens, not a figure printed on the page.

Batch is a trade: a lower price for work that does not need an immediate answer. Google's page is where to confirm the turnaround terms before you plan around them.

Does Sume have a batch tier?

Not in the docs. Sume's pricing path for listed models is one rule: provider list price times 1.25, reserved from your wallet at submit and settled to what ran. The endpoint pricing lines are what your wallet is charged, per the image docs.

What Sume does give you for bulk work is a queue. A valid job over your concurrency limit is accepted as queued and starts when a slot opens, as Generation admission explains. That is about throughput and not about price: queued jobs bill the same as jobs that start immediately.

How should I plan a large image job?

If the work is not urgent and the price gap matters more than the plumbing, price it on Google's batch tier directly. If you want one wallet, one set of job ids, webhooks and the same API for images, video and audio, price it on Sume and pace the submits.

Pace by reading generation_limits on each submit response, and stop adding work when queue_capacity_remaining is low. A full queue returns 429 queue_full, which is not a billing event: the reservation for the failed admission is released or refunded.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/jobs/job_123/cancel \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY"
# cancel queued jobs you no longer need before they start

What is the decision rule?

Take the batch price when you generate more than a few thousand images, the work can wait, and you accept running the batch yourself. Take Sume when integration time, one bill and uniform error handling are worth more than the difference. Whichever you choose, run ten images first and compare real invoices, not list figures.