Price, 2.0 Flash is cheaper than 2.5 Flash but still very good model.

API usage of Flash 2.0 is free, at least till you hit a very generous bound. It's not simply a trial period. You don't even need to register any payment details to get an API key. This might be a reason for its popularity. AFAIK only some Mistral offerings have a similar free tier?

▲

FergusArgyll 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, that's my use case. When you want to test some program / script that utilizes an llm in the middle and you just want to make sure everything non-llm related is working. It's free! just try again and again till it "compiles" and then switch to 2.5

▲

indigodaddy 7 hours ago | parent [-]

wow this would be great for a webapp/site that just needs a basic/performant LLM for some basic tasks.

	▲	nextos 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You might hit some throttling limits. During certain periods of the day, at least in my location, some requests are not served. It might not be OK for that kind of usecase, or might breach ToS. But it's still great. Even my premium Perplexity account doesn't give me free API access.