Google · Announced September 30, 2026; released October 13, 2026
Gemini 4 Argon
Google's frontier model released October 13, 2026 — built for real-world coding and enterprise knowledge work. Paid, with API access at $2/$10 per million tokens.
Best for: people deciding whether this model's paid plan is worth it — and looking for the free way into the same family.
What it costs
Included with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions; API from $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens.
What it is
Gemini 4 Argon is Google's flagship model of late 2026, positioned by the company as its next era of frontier intelligence. Announced on September 30 and released on October 13, 2026, it targets long-horizon, real-world workloads: coding, enterprise knowledge work such as legal analysis, and cyber defense. Google reportedly skipped an intermediate Gemini 3.5 Pro release to aim directly at the competition's next generation.
Access at launch was deliberately limited — initially a small set of trusted testers and business customers, with a broader staged rollout Google calls Fairwind. For developers, API pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, per Google's launch announcements covered by Reuters.
For most people the practical question is not the API price but whether they can try it: the Gemini app's paid tiers (Google AI Pro and Ultra) are the consumer route. The free route into the Gemini family is the Gemini app's free tier and Google AI Studio, Google's free developer playground for Gemini models.
The free way into this family
The Gemini app's free tier and Google AI Studio give you the Gemini family at no cost — the newest frontier model itself sits on paid plans, but everything the free tiers do is the same family of models.
Free Google tools, hand-checked
Genuinely free listings from the same ecosystem — each verified against the provider's own pages:
Google Gemini
Google's AI assistant for writing, research, and image-aware tasks — free to use at gemini.google.com with a Google account, with paid Google AI plans for higher limits and stronger models.
Google AI Studio
Google's free web workspace for building with its Gemini models — prototype prompts, tune settings, work with text, images, and long documents, then export code and get an API key. Free to use at aistudio.google.com with a Google account.