Gemini 4 Argon Is for Sale Now. The Price Doubles December 1.

For two issues in a row I printed a second cheapskate table, because the model at the top of the first one wasn’t for sale. Gemini 4 Argon sat at number one in every Arena category, and you couldn’t buy it unless Google had vetted you as a cyber defender for its Fairwind program.

You can buy it now. Google made it generally available on October 13, and OpenRouter listed it the same day. So I deleted the second table. Then I went to see what the first wave of paying customers had to say, and the top thread on r/GeminiAI is titled “Out of Gemini 4 Argon usage after 10 messages.” You know how that goes.

Argon wasn’t the only thing going on. DeepSeek pushed a “minor update” to its Flash model on Friday, and by Sunday it was the busiest model on OpenRouter. Meta, which went closed back in April, put out open weights again. Reflection shipped a 501B open model with a benchmark claim that the independent numbers don’t back up. StepFun’s weights showed up after all. And somebody broke into OpenCode Console and spent people’s API credits for them.

• Gemini 4 Argon went on sale, and the first complaint was the limits
  • What the paying customers said
• DeepSeek shipped a “minor update” and took the daily top spot
  • The price depends on what time it is
• Open weights week
  • Meta went back to open, sort of
  • Reflection Beam 1.0: big claim, small index
  • Step 5’s weights showed up, and the free traffic left
  • Space Bunny got a name
• The cheapskate table: one table again
  • GLM-5.3-Flash missed Overall by six hundredths of a point
  • The rest of the table
  • Speed is still the catch
• Local sweet spot
• Horror stories
  • OpenCode Console leaked people’s API keys
  • The Argon usage wall
  • The peak-hour batch job
• What’s coming
• Finally

Gemini 4 Argon went on sale, and the first complaint was the limits

As of October 13, Argon is generally available in the Gemini API on the paid plan (the model string is gemini-4-argon), in the Gemini app for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, and in AI Studio and Antigravity for Ultra. The Fairwind-only restriction is gone for paying customers. On OpenRouter it’s $2 in and $10 out, with a flex tier at $1/$5 if you can wait.

That $2/$10 is still the intro price. It has an end date now: $4/$20 from December 1. So if you build a budget on Argon this month, build it on the December number.

So is it worth $10 a million? Arena still has it number one Overall (1524, now on 4,904 votes), plus Coding, Instruction Following, Hard Prompts, and Math. But it lost one. Claude Opus 5.5 took Creative Writing, 1519 to 1516. That’s three and a half points, which is nothing statistically, but it’s the first category Argon hasn’t swept since it showed up. And the Math lead is sitting on 273 votes, so I wouldn’t tattoo that one anywhere.

Artificial Analysis likes it less. Argon scores 53 on the Intelligence Index, tied with GPT-6 Astra and behind Opus 5.5 (58), Sonnet 5.5 (56), and Meta’s Muse Wonder Full (56). That’s the same split I’ve been writing about for weeks: Arena voters love it, the hard benchmarks say it’s frontier but not the top of the frontier.

What the paying customers said

Reddit was reachable this week, so I got real threads instead of aggregator summaries. The loudest ones are about the consumer apps, not the API:

• The r/GeminiAI usage thread I mentioned up top has 733 points and 141 comments. The top comment’s theory is that Argon is just very expensive for Google to run, and the limits are how Google pays for it.
• On r/AntigravityGoogle: “To all the Pro users thinking of upgrading to Ultra for Gemini 4 Argon: Don’t do it. The limits are a joke.” (430 points). Another thread there, “Gemini 4 Argon did way more damage than good” (794 points), has at least one person saying the botched release made them cancel.
• The positive one is from launch week. An r/singularity thread called “Gemini 4 Argon solved hallucinations” got 1,608 points, and the top reply sums it up: “‘solved’ 15% But yeah, it’s a very nice improvement if not benchmaxxed.”

If you want Argon, I’d use the API and pay per token, where you know what you’re getting. Paying for an Ultra subscription to get Argon in the app is the move people are warning each other off of.

DeepSeek shipped a “minor update” and took the daily top spot

On October 17, DeepSeek put out DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017, a new snapshot of the model that was already number one on OpenRouter. It now sits behind DeepSeek’s deepseek-flash API name, and the weights went up on Hugging Face under MIT the same day.

Two days later it had the top spot on OpenRouter’s daily board. The board through October 19 has it at 3.61 trillion tokens for the day, first place, with the original V4.1 Flash second at 2.8 trillion. For the week it’s sixth at 7.34 trillion on about two days of traffic, and first on New & Trending. The original V4.1 Flash is still number one for the week (29.6 trillion), but it’s down 27 percent, so you can watch the traffic move from one to the other. DeepSeek is now 24.4 percent of every request on OpenRouter.

Artificial Analysis gives the 1017 snapshot a 45, second among the 121 open-weights models it tracks (MiMo-V2.6-Pro is first at 46). AA clocks it at 211 tokens a second, with the first token arriving in about a second. The catch is the same one I keep finding with the smart cheap models. It took 210 million output tokens to get through AA’s index, against a median of 140 million, and AA doesn’t put it on the intelligence-versus-cost frontier.

r/LocalLLaMA’s release thread has 1,117 points and 314 comments. The top comment (605 upvotes): “‘minor update’ Proceeds to obliterate GLM5.3, Kimi K3 and GPT5.6 Sol.” Another one notes that “Flash is now 700B,” which is about right going by the size of the safetensors on Hugging Face. And a 519-upvote reply warns that one of the charts going around comes from a knockoff benchmark site dressed up to look like Artificial Analysis. Check where a chart comes from before you share it.

Over on r/DeepSeek, someone ran 1017 against Claude Opus 5.5 on the same task. The top reply had the most sensible take of the week: priced like Haiku, performs closer to Sonnet than Opus. And r/opencode noticed it’s free in OpenCode (1,666 points), where the replies went straight to “you are the product” and complaints about the 200K context cap.

The price depends on what time it is

DeepSeek’s own endpoint charges $0.15 in and $0.60 out off-peak. During peak hours it’s exactly double, $0.30/$1.20. Peak is 01:00 to 04:00 and 06:00 to 10:00 UTC, Monday through Friday. That’s Beijing’s working day. In US Central time, while daylight saving lasts, that’s 8 to 11pm and 1 to 5am.

DeepSeek didn’t invent this for 1017. It’s been charging by the clock since V4.1 launched in September. But now that millions of requests a day are moving onto it, the gap costs real money. “60 cents” is the number everybody quotes and $1.20 is the number you pay if your overnight batch job runs at the wrong damn time. In my cheapskate math I use the $1.20, since that’s the rate you can’t schedule your way out of.

It’s not on Arena yet, so it doesn’t get a row in the table this week. The older V4.1 Flash is in the Overall band at 38th place.

Open weights week

Three labs put out big open-weight models in the same week, and a fourth confirmed a stealth model’s identity. None of them change the cheapskate table yet. One of them is Meta reversing itself.

Meta went back to open, sort of

Back in April, one of my first roundups led with Meta abandoning open source for Muse Spark. On October 15 Meta released Muse Spark Open, with weights on Hugging Face, SageMaker, Vertex Model Garden, and Microsoft Foundry. It’s 816 billion parameters with 42 billion active, a 1M context window, native image and video input, and it’s built for coding and agent work.

The license is the first problem. It ships under the Muse Model License, which has commercial limits, so you can download the weights and still not be allowed to do whatever you want with them. If you’re building a product on it, have somebody read that license before you write any code.

And you aren’t running this at home. The hardware floor is about 700GB of VRAM at NVFP4 (four Blackwell Ultras or eight H200s) and about 2TB at BF16. On Artificial Analysis it scores 39, behind Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 according to Developers Digest. Meta hosts it on OpenRouter at $1.25/$4.25. Why pay $4.25 out for a 39 when DeepSeek’s snapshot scores 45 and tops out at $1.20?

I’ll still take it. Six months ago the story was Meta closing the door, and this week I could pull Muse weights off Hugging Face (if I had a rack of H200s to put them on).

Reflection Beam 1.0: big claim, small index

Reflection AI, the NVIDIA-backed startup from former DeepMind researchers, released Beam 1.0 on October 16. It’s 501B total and 23B active, under Apache 2.0, which is a real open license this time. OpenRouter has it at $0.30/$1.00.

Reflection says it scores 80.9 percent on SWE-bench Verified and is three to four times more efficient than GLM 5.2. Artificial Analysis, which averages a much broader set of hard evals, gives it a 30. It’s fast (AA clocks about 350 tokens a second), but a 30 sits a long way below what that SWE-bench number implies. This is the same vendor-table problem I flagged with Meta’s Muse Wonder last week. The lab’s chart says one thing, the independent average says another, and when they’re this far apart I go with the independent one until someone explains the gap.

Step 5’s weights showed up, and the free traffic left

Last week I said I wouldn’t count StepFun’s promised October 15 weights as shipped until there was something on Hugging Face. There is. stepfun-ai/Step-5-Preview went up on the 15th, with BF16 and NVFP4 variants, though early that morning people were reporting a 404. The license field says “other,” so read it before you use it.

I also said to watch what happened to Step 5’s traffic once the free week ended on October 16. It fell 32 percent to 8.22 trillion tokens, and it’s still fourth on OpenRouter for the week. I figured the freeloaders would bail harder than that. About a third of the traffic left, and I’d guess most of the rest is paying $2.70 out now. Arena still has it 84th Overall. In Coding it’s 63rd, missing the 50-point band by 1.3 points.

Space Bunny got a name

The free stealth model that was number one on OpenRouter three weeks ago has an identity. According to eesel, Space Bunny Alpha was MiniMax M3.1, which is what everybody guessed. MiniMax M3.1 Flash showed up on OpenRouter as a free model on October 19 and did 1.05 trillion tokens on its first day, seventh place. AA gives it 43 at about 105 tokens a second.

There are no Hugging Face weights yet, and no model card or technical report either. You can’t turn thinking off, only turn it down, and it defaults to max effort. And outside the free OpenRouter endpoint, eesel says MiniMax currently sells it through subscription plans at $20, $50, or $120 a month rather than a published per-token price. Free endpoints on OpenRouter have a habit of turning into paid ones with about a week’s notice, so I’ll check on this one next issue.

The cheapskate table: one table again

If you’re new here: for each Arena category I take the leader’s rating, subtract 50, and look for the cheapest model still above that line. The band gets computed in code from every row on the board, and I write down the first model below the line so I know nothing got cut off. The board comes from LMArena’s leaderboard dataset on Hugging Face (arena.ai’s site still blocks me), published October 15. Prices are each maker’s own endpoint on OpenRouter.

Since Argon is for sale now, there’s only one table. Argon is priced at its $10 intro rate.

*2,625 votes, 3.6 points above the cutoff. GLM-5.3-Flash sits at 1525 with 8,457 votes for 50 cents and is still the safer bet.

Band depths: Overall 40, Coding 59, Creative 17, Instruction Following 23, Hard Prompts 35, Math 38.

GLM-5.3-Flash missed Overall by six hundredths of a point

The Overall cutoff is 1473.90. The first model below it is GLM-5.3-Flash at 1473.84. That’s 0.06 points, out of a scale that runs to 1524. If it had made it, it would be the Overall pick at 50 cents and a 20x ratio. Instead the pick is MiMo-V2.6-Pro at 87 cents, for the third issue running.

And GLM pushed 11.9 trillion tokens through OpenRouter this week, second only to DeepSeek. Plenty of people clearly think it’s good enough for general work, and my table leaves it out of Overall over a gap that disappears when you round to whole numbers. I don’t round, though. 1473.84 is under 1473.90, so GLM sits this one out.

It went the other way in Hard Prompts. Last week GLM missed that band by 0.3. This week it’s in by 1.0, on 20,935 votes, and it’s the pick at 20x. It also holds Math for the third issue in a row, 8th place on that board.

The rest of the table

Opus 5.5 beat Argon in Creative Writing, so that ratio now runs against Opus’s $20 instead of Argon’s $10, and Gemini 3.7 Flash stays the pick at 5.3x. Not one open model made that 17-model band. Instruction Following looks the same: the cheapest thing in its band is Gemini 3.8 Flash at $3.75. If you write fiction or need strict instruction following, you’re still paying for quality.

MiMo-V2.6-Flash holds Coding for the third week, and it went up this time, 1,989 votes to 2,625. It’s still only 3.6 points over the line. My rule was that if it held the spot on a few thousand votes I’d call it the Coding pick for real. It’s getting there. I’d still run GLM-5.3-Flash for anything I cared about.

Mark December 1 on the calendar, because every ratio with Argon as the leader doubles that day. Overall goes from 11.5x to 23x, and Hard Prompts and Math go from 20x to 40x, without a single pick changing. Google raises its price and the cheap models start looking twice as good.

Speed is still the catch

The cheap end of the table is still slow. MiMo-V2.6-Pro, the best open model on AA at 46, runs at about 50 tokens a second. MiMo-V2.6-Flash is around 54 and GLM-5.3-Flash about 78 this week (it moves around every week, so I re-pull it). Say your agent runs 20 steps and writes 1,000 tokens at each one. At 50 tokens a second that’s almost seven minutes of waiting. At the 211 that DeepSeek’s 1017 snapshot manages, it’s about a minute and a half, which is why I want to see where it lands once Arena rates it.

The distillation accusation Anthropic made against Xiaomi in September still hangs over the MiMo family. Anthropic made that claim as a competitor, and nobody has ruled on it. If your contracts care where a model’s training data came from, factor it in.

Local sweet spot

This section picks the biggest model that fits your machine with room left for context and still runs at 15 or more tokens a second. Nothing changed this week. I added Gemma 4 26B-A4B to the candidates and it didn’t beat Qwen3.8 27B on any tier. Every big open release this week (Muse Spark Open, Beam, the DeepSeek snapshot) is far too big for a 64GB machine.

The 9B rows have no Arena rating, so they’re picked by what fits, not by a leaderboard. The Mac 32GB speed is still unmeasured. I’m not going to fill it in from a calculator site.

Horror stories

OpenCode Console leaked people’s API keys

Overnight on October 18, attackers got into OpenCode Console, an older part of OpenCode’s online platform where some users store the API keys they use with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. TechCrunch reports that 1.4 percent of Console users got breach notices, and people reported unauthorized charges from a few hundred dollars to more than $1,000. One user: “I saw my Open AI, Anthropic, and Google AI spend alerts all fire off before going to bed.” Some had their Google Cloud projects suspended on top of that, so they lost the money and the projects in the same night.

Anthropic and Google blocked the exposed keys. OpenAI worked with OpenCode on refunds, and OpenCode says it’s refunding the charges too. Co-founder Dax Raad drew the line clearly: “Note this is the OpenCode Console, not OpenCode itself, those keys never come to us.” So the CLI didn’t leak anything. The web console did. OpenCode blamed a “large-scale distillation attack,” and some security people said that hasn’t been proven.

If you ever pasted a provider key into OpenCode Console, rotate it at the provider today. And set spend alerts on every provider account you have. Those alerts are the only reason the guy above found out before morning.

The Argon usage wall

I covered this above, but it’s the most common way people got burned this week. You pay for AI Ultra because you want Argon. You get through a handful of messages and hit the limit. The r/AntigravityGoogle advice is blunt: don’t upgrade for it. The API charges per token at a published price. The app charges a subscription and then cuts you off at a number nobody printed.

The peak-hour batch job

You move a nightly summarization job to DeepSeek V4.1 Flash because it’s 60 cents out. You schedule it at 9pm Central because that’s when your other jobs finish. That’s inside DeepSeek’s peak window, so every token costs double, and you’re paying $1.20 for a model you budgeted at $0.60. In a Hacker News thread about V4.1 Flash, one commenter said they burned through $50 in a few days on the cheapest provider on OpenRouter, a quarter of what their Codex subscription costs. Cheap per token isn’t the same as cheap per job. Check what time your jobs actually run.

What’s coming

Argon’s API price doubles to $4/$20 on December 1, and that’s the only item in this section with a firm date.

Mistral Large 4’s open weights are still scheduled for October 31. Kimi K3.1 has a rumored October 29 date, and Grok 4.8 was supposed to land around today, according to the LLM countdown tracker. I’ve learned to treat xAI dates as tweets. Claude Fable 5.5 is at about 93 percent on Manifold for October, and Anthropic hasn’t said a word. Haiku 5.5 still doesn’t have an Arena rating, two weeks after launch. MiniMax hasn’t posted M3.1 Flash weights or a model card. DeepSeek V5 is still speculation.

Finally

Every headline this week came with a condition attached. Argon is buyable, until December 1 changes the price. DeepSeek is 60 cents, unless the clock says otherwise. Meta’s weights are open, under a license you have to read first. If you only skim the launch posts, you’ll budget off the wrong number.

So what actually changed for somebody picking a model today? Less than the headlines suggest. The top of the board got a price tag. The bottom of my table held for a third week: MiMo-V2.6-Pro, MiMo-V2.6-Flash, and GLM-5.3-Flash, all under a dollar out, and I’d still start any cost-sensitive project with GLM-5.3-Flash and see whether it falls short before paying 20 times more.

Next week I’ll see whether DeepSeek’s 1017 snapshot gets an Arena rating, and whether it lands in the band at $1.20. And I’ll keep checking whether Haiku 5.5 ever gets rated.