Comment by simonw

An often overlooked feature of the Gemini models is that they can write and execute Python code directly via their API.

My llm-gemini plugin supports that: https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini

  uv tool install llm
  llm install llm-gemini
  llm keys set gemini
  # paste key here
  llm -m gemini-2.5-flash-preview-04-17 \
    -o code_excution 1 \
    'render a mandelbrot fractal in ascii art'

I ran that just now and got this: https://gist.github.com/simonw/cb431005c0e0535343d6977a7c470...

They don't charge anything extra for code execution, you just pay for input and output tokens. The above example used 10 input, 1,531 output which is $0.15/million for input and $3.50/million output for Gemini 2.5 Flash with thinking enabled, so 0.536 cents (just over half a cent) for this prompt.