Google sets Argon pricing at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output

Google has put a price on Argon, its new AI service. Developers will pay $2 for every million input tokens and $10 for every million output tokens. The pricing was announced in late September 2026. Google has not said which division is behind the product. What the numbers actually mean A token is a chunk of text that an AI model reads or writes, often a word or part of one. Input tokens are what you feed the model: your prompt, your documents, your instructions. Output tokens are what the model produces in response. Under Argon’s pricing, output costs five times as much as input. A developer who sends Argon one million tokens and gets one million back would pay $12 in total: $2 for the input and $10 for the output. An app that pushes 100 million input tokens through Argon would spend $200 on the reading side. If the model then generates 100 million tokens of output, that half of the bill comes to $1,000. Why output costs more Generating a response takes more computation than processing a prompt. The model has to produce its answer piece by piece, and each new token requires work. Providers pass that cost along, and Argon follows the same pattern. Token-based billing is the standard...