Nano Banana 2 Lite
the budget tier that outscores the flagship it's cheaper than
scores above full nano banana 2 on artificial analysis at half the price and nearly three times the speed — the value story of 2026.
this is the entry that breaks the usual assumption. released at the end of june, nano banana 2 lite posts a higher artificial analysis elo than the full nano banana 2 it sits beneath in google's own lineup, at $0.034 per image against $0.067, and generates in about four seconds — roughly 2.7× faster.
cheap tiers being strictly worse used to be a safe rule. it isn't any more, and if you are generating at volume you should benchmark this before paying for anything above it.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- ai image models
- pricing
- $0.034 / image at 1K direct from google
- website
- ai.google.dev
scores above full nano banana 2 on artificial analysis at half the price and nearly three times the speed — the value story of 2026.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.
more ai image models
GPT Image 2
we checked this$0.006 low / $0.053 medium / $0.211 high, at 1024×1024the only model that leads both generation and editing
Reve 2.1
we checked this~$0.04 / image on fal's reve endpointthe independent lab that reasons about layout before it draws