Yes, but this Flash is a lot more powerful - beating Gemini 3 Pro on some benchmarks (and pretty close on others).

I don't view this as a "new Flash" but as "a much cheaper Gemini 3 Pro/GPT-5.2"

I would be less salty if they gave us 3 Flash Lite at same price as 2.5 Flash or cheaper with better capability, but they still focus on the pricier models :(

We'll probably get 3 Flash Lite eventually, it just takes time to distill the models, and you want to start with the one that is likely to bring in more money.

Same! I want to do some data stuff from documents and 2.0 pricing was amazing, but the constant increases go the wrong way for this task :/

Right, depends on your use cases. I was looking forward to the model as an upgrade to 2.5 Flash, but when you're processing hundreds of millions of tokens a day (not hard to do if you're dealing in documents or emails with a few users), the economics fall apart.