gemini-3-5-flash - ByteSpike

gemini-3-5-flash is Google’s mid-tier Gemini — fast and multimodal, with the 1M-token context window that distinguishes the Gemini family. It offers solid reasoning headroom at a fraction of flagship pricing. Pricing:

1.50 / 1M input,

9.00 / 1M output — see the rate card.

Protocols

Protocol	Path
Gemini Native	`POST https://llm.bytespike.ai/v1beta/models/gemini-3-5-flash:generateContent`
OpenAI Chat Completions (shim)	`POST https://llm.bytespike.ai/v1/chat/completions`
Anthropic Messages (translated)	`POST https://llm.bytespike.ai/v1/messages`

For the OpenAI shim, the gateway translates the request body to Gemini’s generateContent shape behind the scenes. From the client side, you write standard openai-SDK code.

Quickstart

curl https://llm.bytespike.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $BYTESPIKE_API_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "gemini-3-5-flash",
    "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello, ByteSpike." }]
  }'

Capabilities

Capability	Supported
Chat Completions (shim)	✅
Streaming (SSE)	✅
Vision (image input)	✅
Tools / function calling	✅ parallel
JSON mode	✅
Grounding (web search)	✅
Long context	✅ 1M tokens
Context window	1M tokens

When to use

Mid-tier reasoning at low cost — harder tasks than Flash can handle, without stepping up to Pro pricing.
Long-context work — 1M context for codebase reviews and multi-doc QA where 200K isn’t enough.
Fresh-fact tasks — grounding (Google Search) is supported.

When not to use:

Cheapest possible chat — gpt-5-4-mini is lower cost for simpler tasks.
Hardest reasoning — claude-opus-4-8 is a flagship sized for it.

Next

gpt-5-4-mini — fast, low-cost OpenAI tier
claude-haiku-4-5 — fast Anthropic small tier