Roboflow
Google

Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Overview

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, released for general availability on July 22, 2025, is the most cost-efficient model in the Gemini 2.5 family, designed for high-volume and latency-sensitive tasks. It is multimodal, supporting text, images, video, audio, and PDFs as inputs, with text as its primary output. The model handles up to 1 million input tokens and generates outputs up to 64K tokens, making it suitable for large-scale document or media processing at low cost. It is built on a Sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture with native multimodal support, though exact parameter counts are undisclosed.

Flash-Lite offers the lowest usage cost among Gemini 2.5 models. It introduces developer controls for “thinking mode,” allowing fine-tuning of reasoning depth vs. efficiency. It also integrates native tools such as code execution, search grounding, and URL context. While strong on translation, classification, coding, and general multimodal reasoning, it lacks support for image or audio generation in its stable release and is less capable than Gemini 2.5 Flash or Pro on complex reasoning-heavy workflows.

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Interactive Demo

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Details & Performance

Details

Resources

Vision Tasks

CaptioningChart Question AnsweringClassificationDocument Question AnsweringImage TaggingMulti-Label ClassificationOCRObject DetectionVision LanguageVisual Question Answering

Features

Foundation VisionLLMs with Vision CapabilitiesMultimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Arena Rankings

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Vision Evals

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite has not yet been evaluated on the current benchmark. The results below are from the legacy version of Vision Evals, our previous benchmark. See the current Vision Evals

Visual Understanding

77 models · 67 tasks
HighestLowest
This model#60 of 7753.73% pass rate · better than 19%
Score53.73%pass rate across 67 tasks
Speed7.19savg response per task
Cost<$0.0001 / task$0.100 in · $0.400 out / 1M
Tokens301 / task294 in · 6 out
Score key:≥75%40–74%<40%
CategoryPassedScore
Object Understanding10 / 14
71.4%
Defect Detection10 / 15
66.7%
Document Understanding6 / 9
66.7%
Spatial Understanding9 / 19
47.4%
Object Counting1 / 10
10%
HighestLowest
This model#29 of 5877.73% pass rate · better than 50%
Score77.73%pass rate across 229 tasks
Speed7.45savg response per task
Cost<$0.0001 / task$0.100 in · $0.400 out / 1M
Tokens303 / task290 in · 12 out
Score key:≥75%40–74%<40%
CategoryPassedScore
License Plate Recognition27 / 30
90%
Text Recognition24 / 30
80%
Focused Scene OCR75 / 99
75.8%
VQA & Extraction45 / 60
75%
Handwritten Math7 / 10
70%

Scores based on a single evaluation run · Methodology

View all legacy Vision Evals results →

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Pricing

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite costs $0.100 per 1M input tokens and $0.400 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.100 / 1M tokens
Output$0.400 / 1M tokens
Cached input$0.010 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Aug 12, 2026

Price vs. performance

Estimated cost per task vs. Visual Understanding score, for this model and others ranked near it. Upper-left is the sweet spot (high quality, low cost). Based on Vision Evals (legacy) results.

7 of 7 models plotted

ModelScoreMedian tokensEst. cost / taskCompare
AnthropicClaude Opus 4.159.7%2.1K$0.040Compare
AnthropicClaude Haiku 4.558.2%2.3K$0.0030Compare
OpenAIGPT-5 Nano58.2%2.7K$0.0003Compare
QwenQwen3.5 397B A17B58.2%1.5K$0.0008Compare
GoogleGemini 2.5 Flash55.2%476$0.0005Compare
GoogleGemini 2.5 Flash-Lite(this model)53.7%301<$0.0001
MoonshotAIKimi K2.535.8%2.7K$0.0031Compare

Alternatives to Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

OpenAI
GPT-5 Nano
GPT-5 Nano, released by OpenAI on August 7, 2025, is the smallest and most cost-efficient model in the GPT-5 family. Like its larger counterparts, it is multimodal—accepting text and images, supporting tool use, structured outputs, and reasoning—but it is optimized for speed, low latency, and affordability. It features input and output token limits of roughly 272K and 128K tokens respectively, enabling large-context processing even at its compact scale. Its knowledge cutoff is around May 2024, slightly earlier than the full GPT-5 model.GPT-5 Nano is well-suited for high-volume or cost-sensitive deployments such as mobile apps, embedded AI systems, or rapid-response APIs. While it offers less depth on complex reasoning and coding tasks compared to GPT-5 Mini or Pro, it retains core multimodal and agentic capabilities, making it an attractive option where efficiency and scale matter more than maximum performance.
Anthropic
Claude Haiku 4.5
Claude Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic’s lightweight model in the Claude 4.5 series, released in October 2025 under a proprietary license. Designed for speed and cost efficiency, it delivers near-frontier performance while maintaining Anthropic’s AI Safety Level 2 standard. Haiku 4.5 supports both text and multimodal (text and image) inputs, integrates tool use and extended reasoning, and features a 200,000 token context window, making it adept at handling long or complex workflows. Though the parameter count remains undisclosed, it achieves about 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified, reflecting strong coding and reasoning ability. Haiku 4.5 is ideal for developers and researchers seeking rapid, cost-effective model calls for analysis, coding, or multimodal understanding.
Qwen
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct
Qwen3 VL 8B Instruct is an open-weight multimodal vision-language model developed by Qwen / Alibaba Cloud as part of the Qwen3-VL series, designed for instruction-following tasks that combine text with visual inputs such as images and video. Released around October 2025 under the Apache-2.0 license, it targets developers who need capable multimodal reasoning without the scale or cost of very large models.The model contains roughly 8.8 billion dense parameters and supports text, image, and video understanding with strong spatial perception, visual reasoning, and emerging visual agent abilities such as GUI interaction. A standout feature is its native ~256K token context window, extendable to around 1M tokens, enabling long-document reading and extended video comprehension. In today’s landscape, it balances openness, long-context capacity, and solid multimodal performance against heavier proprietary models. Typical applications include multimodal assistants, document and video analysis, visual question answering, and research or product prototyping where transparency and deployability matter.
Google
Gemma 3 4B
Gemma 3 4B, released on March 12, 2025, is the mid-sized member of Google DeepMind’s open-weight Gemma 3 family. With about 4 billion parameters, it is multimodal—supporting text and image inputs and generating text outputs. Like the larger Gemma 3 models, it features a 128,000-token input context window with an output capacity of ~8,192 tokens, enabling it to handle long documents and mixed text–image reasoning tasks.The 4B variant is designed as a balance between efficiency and capability: it offers multilingual support across 140+ languages, strong summarization and reasoning performance, and compatibility with moderate hardware. Inference can run with ~6.4 GB VRAM in BF16, or significantly less in quantized 8-bit (~4.4 GB) or 4-bit (~3.4 GB) modes, making it accessible to developers outside large-scale infrastructure. While it lags behind the 12B and 27B versions on the most complex reasoning and multimodal benchmarks, its lower compute footprint makes it ideal for research, prototyping, and practical deployment where efficiency matters.

Other Google Gemini Flash-Lite models

Other versions in the same family as Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite.

Deploy Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite with an API

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite runs as a hosted REST endpoint through Roboflow Workflows. Pick a task, then hand the prompt to your coding agent or copy the code. Deploying the workflow into a free Roboflow workspace replaces the your-workspace and YOUR_API_KEY placeholders with your own.

Connect your agent to Roboflow (once)

Add the Roboflow MCP server

claude mcp add --transport http roboflow https://mcp.roboflow.com/mcp

Run /mcp and authorize Roboflow in your browser when the OAuth flow opens.

Start a new Claude Code session so the MCP loads, then paste the prompt below (it works the same in any agent).

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

Integrate the Roboflow "Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite" workflow into my app.

- Endpoint: POST https://serverless.roboflow.com/<your-workspace>/workflows/gemini-2-5-flash-lite-captioning
- Auth: send my Roboflow API key as `api_key` in the request body, read from the ROBOFLOW_API_KEY env var (never hardcode).
- Body: { "api_key": ..., "inputs": { `image`: { type: "url" | "base64", value } } }.
- Billing: this workflow needs no provider API key — inference runs on my Roboflow credits. A BYO provider key can be added to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor later.

With the Roboflow MCP connected, call `workflows_get` on "gemini-2-5-flash-lite-captioning" to read the exact input schema (the source of truth), then `workflows_run` on a sample image to confirm the output shape before writing code (the MCP is authenticated, so this needs no key). Without the MCP, use the contract above.

Before running the app, set up these keys so it does not error at runtime:
- `ROBOFLOW_API_KEY` (sent as `api_key`) from https://app.roboflow.com/settings/api
Create a .gitignore'd .env with these variables, using placeholder values for any I haven't given you. Then pause and tell me directly, in your reply: the full path to the .env file, exactly which keys I need to paste in, and the link to get each one. Wait for me to confirm I've added them before you run anything. Do not run the app until I confirm.

Then add the integration to my codebase: match my project's language, framework, and conventions; read every key from environment variables (never hardcode); add basic error handling; and include a small runnable example. If you can't tell what language my project uses, ask me.
Installpip install inference-sdk

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
# 1. Import the library
from inference_sdk import InferenceHTTPClient

# 2. Connect to your workflow
client = InferenceHTTPClient(
  api_url="https://serverless.roboflow.com",
  api_key="YOUR_API_KEY"
)

# 3. Run your workflow on an image
result = client.run_workflow(
  workspace_name="your-workspace",
  workflow_id="gemini-2-5-flash-lite-captioning",
  images={
    "image": "YOUR_IMAGE.jpg"  # Path to your image file
  },
  use_cache=True  # cache workflow definition for 15 minutes
)

# 4. Get your results
print(result)

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

// Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
const response = await fetch('https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/gemini-2-5-flash-lite-captioning', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    api_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY',
    inputs: {
      "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"}
    }
  })
});

const result = await response.json();
console.log(result);

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
curl --location 'https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/gemini-2-5-flash-lite-captioning' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
  "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "inputs": {
    "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"}
  }
}'

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite License

Proprietary

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is proprietary: the weights are not distributed, and the Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite license is the vendor's commercial terms of service that you accept when you call the API.

Commercial use
Permitted under the vendor terms, typically metered per token or per request, with the vendor usage policy applying to your inputs and outputs.
Modification
Not available. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite weights are closed, so you can configure prompts and use vendor-hosted fine-tuning where it is offered, but you cannot modify the model itself.
Redistribution
Not permitted. You cannot self-host or resell the model; you build on the hosted API instead.

Vendor terms govern data retention, whether your inputs can be trained on, rate limits, and regional availability, and they can change with notice. Review them if you handle regulated or customer data.

Do I need a commercial license for Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite?

Proprietary terms are set by the vendor rather than negotiated per project, and no open-source obligation attaches to your code. If you would rather deploy a model whose commercial license is included in your plan — on Roboflow Managed Cloud or a Self-Hosted Inference Server — Roboflow's licensing page lists the supported alternatives to Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite.

Do not hesitate to reach out with questions for your commercial project — our team will help you start solving business problems on the first call. See Roboflow commercial licensing for the models included in each plan.

Talk to sales

This model is proprietary. The author retains all rights, and use of the model is governed by their specific terms of service or license agreement.

Commercial use depends on the terms set by the model author. Most proprietary commercial models require a paid subscription, API key, or per-call billing. Check the provider’s pricing and terms-of-service for details.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions About Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Vision

Yes. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite accepts image input, and on Roboflow's previous vision benchmark it passed 53.7% of visual understanding tasks (#60 of 77) and scored 77.7% on OCR. You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite has not yet been evaluated on Roboflow's current Vision Evals. The results on this page are from the previous benchmark.

Yes. The demo on this page runs Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite in the free Roboflow Playground: upload an image and see results in seconds. A free account unlocks unlimited runs.