Nano Banana 2.1 Debuts at Half the Image Cost of Its Predecessor

Google released Nano Banana 2.1, an image generation and editing model based on Gemini 3.6 Flash, on October 6, 2026, with availability across the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and paid-tier API image output priced at $30 per million tokens. The Nano Banana 2.1 model card, published the same day, describes the model as a member of the Gemini 3 series of natively multimodal reasoning models.

It accepts text strings and images as input with a context window of up to 1 million tokens, and it generates image and text output, listed with 4K token and 64K token outputs respectively. The card lists distribution through the Gemini app, Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, AI Mode in Google Search, Google Ads, Google Flow, and Google Stitch.

On the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, the model carries the identifier gemini-nano-banana-2.1 at the generally available launch stage, with a listed release date of October 6, 2026. Google’s platform documentation describes Nano Banana 2.1 as optimized for multimodal image generation and editing, offering a balance…