Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free)
Gemma 4 26B A4B IT is an instruction-tuned Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model from Google DeepMind. Despite 25.2B total parameters, only 3.8B activate per token during inference — delivering near-31B quality at...
Anyone in the Project can @-mention Google: Gemma 4 26B A4B (free) with the team's shared context - pooled credits, one chat, one memory.
Starter is free forever - 1 Project, 100 credits/month, 1 MCP. No card.
Verdict
Best for
- Budget-constrained multimodal prototyping
- High-volume inference with zero API costs
- Video and image analysis for internal tools
- Educational projects requiring vision capabilities
- Experimentation before committing to paid tiers
Strengths
The 131K context window handles long documents and multi-turn conversations comfortably. Multimodal support for images and video at zero cost is rare — most competitors charge per token or restrict free tiers to text-only. The model ships from Google's infrastructure with predictable latency. For teams running thousands of requests daily on tight budgets, the economics are unbeatable.
Trade-offs
No public benchmarks means you're flying blind on quality relative to peers like GPT-4o mini or Claude Haiku. Free models typically trail paid offerings by 6-12 months in capability. Video understanding is likely basic — expect frame extraction and simple scene description, not nuanced temporal reasoning. Rate limits and throughput caps on free tiers can bottleneck production use cases.
Specifications
- Provider
- Category
- llm
- Context length
- 262,144 tokens
- Max output
- 32,768 tokens
- Modalities
- image, text, video
- License
- proprietary
- Released
- 2026-04-03
Pricing
- Input
- $0.00/Mtok
- Output
- $0.00/Mtok
- Model ID
google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it:free
Per-token prices show what the model costs upstream. On Switchy your team draws from one shared org credit pool - one plan, one balance for everyone.
Team cost calculator
5 seats · 80 msgs/day
Switchy meters this against your org's shared credit pool - one plan, one balance for everyone.
Providers
| Provider | Context | Input | Output | P50 latency | Throughput | 30d uptime |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 131k | $0.00/Mtok | $0.00/Mtok | — | — | — |
Performance
Benchmarks
Works well with
Top MCPs
Compatibility data comes from first-party telemetry; once we have enough co-usage signal, top MCPs for this model will appear here.
How Switchy teams use it
Starter prompts
Extract Invoice Line Items
Extract all line items from this invoice image as a JSON array. Include description, quantity, unit price, and total for each item.Open in a Project →
Summarize Meeting Recording
Watch this meeting recording and list the key decisions made, action items assigned, and any unresolved questions. Format as bullet points.Open in a Project →
Analyze Product Screenshot
Describe the layout and main UI components in this screenshot. Identify the primary call-to-action and any usability concerns you notice.Open in a Project →
Draft Social Media Caption
Write a 2-sentence Instagram caption for this product photo. Highlight the key feature visible in the image and include a call-to-action.Open in a Project →
Transcribe Handwritten Notes
Transcribe all handwritten text from this image into plain text. Preserve line breaks and formatting where possible.Open in a Project →
Example outputs
Illustrative - representative of the model's voice and quality, not literal recordings.
Review this Python function for potential bugs and suggest improvements. Focus on edge cases and performance.
The function handles the happy path correctly, but there are three issues: First, it doesn't validate input types—passing a string where an integer is expected will cause a runtime error. Second, the loop creates a new list on each iteration instead of pre-allocating, which impacts performance with large datasets. Third, there's no handling for empty input, which will raise an IndexError. I'd recommend adding type hints, using list comprehension for the transformation, and adding an early return for empty collections.
This example shows Gemma 4's code review capabilities within its 262K token context window, allowing it to analyze substantial codebases. The response is structured and actionable, though without benchmark data we can't compare its bug-detection accuracy to specialized code models like Claude or GPT-4.
Analyze this product photo and suggest three specific improvements to make it more appealing for e-commerce. The image shows a ceramic mug on a wooden table with natural window light.
The composition has good natural lighting, but three changes would strengthen it: First, the mug is slightly off-center—shifting it to follow the rule of thirds would create better visual balance. Second, the wooden table texture competes with the mug's glaze; a neutral backdrop would make the product pop. Third, the window light creates a harsh shadow on the right side; adding a white reflector opposite the window would soften shadows and show the mug's color more accurately. These adjustments would increase perceived product quality.
Demonstrates Gemma 4's multimodal analysis across image and text. The 262K context means it could process entire product catalogs in one session. However, without vision-specific benchmarks, we can't verify its accuracy against models like GPT-4V or Claude 3.5 Sonnet for visual tasks.
Summarize this 45-minute investor call transcript, highlighting key financial metrics, strategic pivots mentioned, and any forward guidance provided by the CEO.
The CEO reported Q3 revenue of $847M (up 23% YoY) and raised full-year guidance to $3.2-3.3B. Three strategic shifts emerged: First, the company is exiting the consumer hardware segment to focus on enterprise software, expecting $120M in restructuring costs. Second, they're accelerating AI infrastructure investment, allocating $400M in CapEx for H1 next year. Third, international expansion is paused until regulatory clarity improves in the EU. Management expects these changes to improve operating margins from 18% to 25% by end of next fiscal year, though near-term earnings will take a hit from the restructuring.
Showcases Gemma 4's long-context strength—262K tokens easily accommodates full transcripts with room for follow-up questions. The free pricing makes it viable for high-volume document processing. Trade-off: without benchmark scores, users can't assess its factual accuracy against paid alternatives for business-critical summaries.
Use-case deep-dives
Free 262K context makes Gemma 4 26B ideal for early-stage bot work
A 4-person startup building a customer support chatbot needs to iterate fast without burning budget on API calls. Gemma 4 26B gives you 262,144 tokens of context at $0.00/Mtok, which means you can load entire conversation histories, product docs, and FAQ databases into every request during the prototype phase. The multimodal support (text, image, video) lets you test visual troubleshooting flows without switching models. You won't hit production-grade latency or the reasoning ceiling of frontier models, but for the first 500 conversations where you're tuning prompts and testing edge cases, free context at this scale beats paying $2-5/Mtok on a commercial model. Once you validate product-market fit and conversation volume crosses 2,000/day, budget for a faster paid model.
When free multimodal input justifies slower processing on large doc sets
A legal aid nonprofit needs to extract key clauses from 1,200 scanned lease agreements (mix of PDFs and phone photos). Gemma 4 26B handles image and text input at zero cost, and the 262K context window fits most full leases in a single call. You'll process these overnight in batch mode—speed isn't the constraint when you're comparing $0.00 to $15-40 in API costs for the same job on GPT-4V or Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The model lacks public benchmarks, so test accuracy on 20 sample leases first; if extraction quality is above 85% on your schema, the cost savings justify manual review of edge cases. This works for one-time projects or monthly batches under 5,000 documents. Above that volume, pay for a faster model to avoid multi-day processing queues.
Zero-cost video analysis for low-stakes community moderation at small scale
A 12-person online course platform needs to flag potentially inappropriate student-uploaded video intros before they go live in cohort channels. Gemma 4 26B's video modality and free pricing let you run every upload through a content policy check without adding a line item to your infrastructure budget. You're processing 40-80 videos/day, and false positives just route to human review—this isn't high-stakes moderation where a miss costs you regulatory exposure. The model's lack of published benchmarks means you can't predict accuracy against NSFW datasets, so run a 2-week shadow mode comparing its flags to your current manual review. If it catches 70%+ of policy violations with under 10% false positives, deploy it as a first-pass filter and keep one moderator in the loop for final calls.
Frequently asked
Is Gemma 4 26B good for general text tasks?
Yes, it handles most standard text work competently — drafting, summarization, Q&A, basic reasoning. The 26B parameter count puts it in the mid-tier range, so expect solid performance on everyday tasks but not frontier-level reasoning. The 262k context window means you can feed it entire codebases or long documents without chunking.
Is Gemma 4 26B actually free to use?
Yes, it's completely free with zero per-token costs for both input and output. Google subsidizes this as part of their open model strategy. For prototyping, side projects, or high-volume low-stakes work, the economics are unbeatable. Just know you're trading cost for the performance ceiling of larger commercial models.
Can Gemma 4 26B process images and video reliably?
It supports image and video inputs, but without public benchmarks we can't verify multimodal quality. Expect basic visual understanding — describing images, extracting text from screenshots — but don't rely on it for nuanced visual reasoning or complex video analysis. Test your specific use case before committing to production.
How does Gemma 4 26B compare to GPT-4o mini?
GPT-4o mini will outperform it on reasoning tasks and instruction-following, but costs money. Gemma 4 wins on price and context window size (262k vs 128k). If you need free inference and can tolerate slightly rougher outputs, Gemma 4 makes sense. For customer-facing work requiring polish, pay for GPT-4o mini.
Should I use Gemma 4 26B for production chatbots?
Only if budget is the primary constraint and you can handle occasional off-target responses. The free pricing removes cost risk, but 26B models lack the consistency of frontier chat models. Build robust fallback logic, log failures, and be ready to upgrade if quality issues surface at scale.
Compare with
More language models
- Google: Gemma 4 31Bgoogle
- Google: Gemma 4 31B (batch)google
- Google: Gemma 4 31B (free)google
- IBM: Granite 4.0 Microibm-granite
- IBM: Granite 4.1 8Bibm-granite
- IBM: Granite 4.2 8Bibm-granite
- Inception: Mercury 2inception
- Inception: Mercury 2.5 Previewinception
- Kwaipilot: KAT-Coder-Pro V2kwaipilot
- Kwaipilot: KAT-Coder-Pro V2.5kwaipilot
- Ling-3.0-flashinclusionai
- Ling 3.0 Flash Fininclusionai