Google's Nano Banana 2.1 is generally available: half Nano Banana 2's price per image, and Nano Banana 2 shuts down Oct 29

Google made Nano Banana 2.1 generally available in the Gemini API today, as gemini-nano-banana-2.1. Per Google's changelog it is an update to Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image) that keeps Flash-level speed and cost while improving visual quality, prompt adherence, multi-turn character consistency and text rendering. It also adds wide and panoramic aspect ratios (1:4, 4:1, 1:8 and 8:1) at 1K, 2K and 4K.

THE PRICE

From Google's pricing page, per million tokens:

- Input: $1.50 for text, image or video - Output: $7.50 for text and thinking, $30 for images

That works out to $0.0336 for a 1K image, $0.0504 for 2K and $0.0756 for 4K, about half of Nano Banana 2's per-image price ($0.067 for 1K, $0.151 for 4K). Prompts cost more: input is $1.50 against Nano Banana 2's $0.50. Batch runs at half price. OpenRouter lists it as google/gemini-nano-banana-2.1, served by Google AI Studio at the same rates.

THE CATCH FOR NANO BANANA 2 USERS

Google is deprecating Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image) and will shut it down on October 29, 2026, and tells developers to move to 2.1.

WHAT WE DO NOT KNOW

Google has published no benchmark numbers for 2.1, and no independent image leaderboard has scored it yet. Leak accounts (lyraxana, LuminaBench and Mr_Salio) reported it running in Google Flow on October 5, before the API release. Google has not confirmed that.