THE SHORT VERSION
● Every resolution is exactly half price. 1K drops from $0.067 to $0.0336, 2K from $0.101 to $0.0504, 4K from $0.151 to $0.0756.
● Nano Banana 2 shuts down 29 October 2026. That is three weeks from launch. The model id gemini-3.1-flash-image stops working.
● The 512px tier is gone. 2.1 supports 1K, 2K and 4K only. If you render thumbnails at 512px, you have no like-for-like replacement.
● Text output got more expensive — $7.50 per million against $3.00. Image output is what got cheaper.
The pricing, at every resolution
| Per image | Nano Banana 2.1 | Nano Banana 2 | Batch (2.1) |
|---|
| 512px | Not supported | $0.045 | — |
| 1K | $0.0336 | $0.067 | $0.0168 |
| 2K | $0.0504 | $0.101 | $0.0252 |
| 4K | $0.0756 | $0.151 | $0.0378 |
The halving is consistent and exact across all three surviving tiers, which suggests a deliberate repricing rather than an efficiency gain passed through unevenly.
One number is worth pausing on: 2.1 at 1K costs $0.0336, which is less than Nano Banana 2 charged for a 512px image at $0.045. If you were rendering at 512px purely to save money, the cheapest option now produces a better image.
What the token pricing does
| Per 1M tokens | Nano Banana 2.1 | Nano Banana 2 |
|---|
| Input (text, image or video) | $1.50 | $1.50 |
| Image output | $30 | $60 |
| Image output, batch | $15 | $30 |
| Text and thinking output | $7.50 | $3.00 |
Image output halved. Text and thinking output went up two and a half times. For a pure image pipeline that is a straight win. For a workflow that asks the model to reason about an image and return a written description, the economics moved against you — and that case is easy to miss, because the headline says the price was cut.
The three-week window
Google's changelog states that gemini-3.1-flash-image — Nano Banana 2 — will be shut down on 29 October 2026. The 2.1 release landed on 6 October. That is 23 days to migrate.
Three things make this more than a version bump:
- The API identifier changed. The new string is
gemini-nano-banana-2.1. It is not an alias, so the old id will not silently redirect — it will stop working.
- 512px has no replacement. Any pipeline generating thumbnails or previews at 512px needs to move to 1K and downscale, or move provider.
- Output limits and behaviour will differ. Half the price at the same resolution usually means a different model underneath, so regenerate your reference set and compare before you cut over.
If you have images in production, put the 29th in your calendar today. A shutdown date three weeks after launch is short, and nothing fails more loudly than an image endpoint that stops returning images.
What is missing from the launch
Independent benchmarks. As of 7 October there is no arena placement, Elo score or vote count for Nano Banana 2.1 — only Google's own positioning and the price list.
That is normal for a model three days old, and it is also the reason to run your own comparison rather than trust the halving. A price cut and a quality cut look identical on an invoice.
What to do
- Rendering at 1K, 2K or 4K → migrate now. Half price, same resolutions, 23 days.
- Rendering at 512px → this is the one that bites. Move to 1K at $0.0336 and downscale locally; it is still cheaper than the 512px tier you are losing.
- Using the model for text or reasoning about images → check your token mix before celebrating. Thinking output went from $3.00 to $7.50.
- Running high volume → batch rates are half again: $0.0168 per 1K image.
- Before you cut over → regenerate twenty reference prompts on both and compare. There are no independent benchmarks to do it for you.
Sources