Google Launches Nano Banana 2.1: Better Than Its Predecessor at Half the Price

By Jose Antonio Lanz

Google on Tuesday released Nano Banana 2.1, the newest version of the AI model that turns a typed sentence into a picture, or edits a photo you already have.

It's rolling out in the Gemini app, Google Search's AI Mode, Google Ads and developer tools including Google AI Studio, Flow and Stitch.

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The original Nano Banana made Gemini a hit. In September 2025, its trick of turning selfies into collectible figurines pushed Gemini to No. 1 on both major app stores, dethroning ChatGPT after nearly three years.

Alphabet's market value topped $3 trillion in the same stretch.

Version 2 arrived in February, built on Gemini 3.1 Flash Image. Its big trick was checking Google Search before drawing real-world things, so a picture of an actual event or person had a better shot at being right.

So what's new in this update? Google points to three upgrades: better visual design, sharper mask-based editing (you mark one region and only that area changes), and better subject consistency, meaning a person or object still looks like itself after several edits.

On overall preference in text-to-image tests, Nano Banana 2.1 scored 1,050 ELO Points. Nano Banana 2 scored 990 and Nano Banana Pro scored 935. In the ELO system, the more points the better. It doesn’t have a ceiling, so it is purely qualitative.

On paper, it handles up to 14 reference images at once, tracking up to four characters and ten objects. It outputs up to 4K, roughly TV-level sharpness, in formats as wide as 8:1.

Developers can also set how long it "thinks" before drawing, from minimal to high, and let it ground its results in Google Search and Google Image Search. In plain words, it can look things up before it draws them.

Through Google's developer API, the pipe that lets other companies' apps use the model, a standard 1K image costs $0.0336. That's about half of Nano Banana 2's $0.067.

A 4K image runs $0.0756 versus $0.151. Batch jobs, big piles of images processed in bulk instead of instantly, get another 50% off.

At the standard 1K price, a thousand images now cost about $33.60 through the API, down from $67 on Nano Banana 2, which makes this model extremely good and also very efficient and cost effective.

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