Platform WatchJune 30, 2026via Vercel Blog
Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image) now on AI Gateway
Why it matters
Google's latest multimodal image model drops cost and latency simultaneously, making fast image generation accessible to cost-conscious builders. This represents a tangible shift in the pricing/performance frontier for image inference at scale.
Key signals
- Nano Banana 2 Lite available on Vercel AI Gateway
- Image generation in <4 seconds
- Cost: $0.034 per image (1K batch)
- ~50% cheaper than Nano Banana 2
- ~75% cheaper than Nano Banana Pro
- Multimodal: generates images alongside text
- Supports iterative image editing across multiple turns
- Available via streamText and generateText APIs
- Model ID: google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image
The hook
50% cheaper per image. Google's Nano Banana 2 Lite just shipped on Vercel's AI Gateway—sub-4s generation at $0.034/1K images.
Nano Banana 2 Lite from Google is now available on . This Flash-Lite-tier image model is built for fast, low-cost generation. It generates images alongside text in <4s and can edit existing images across multiple turns.AI Gateway
The cost is also lower than previous Nano Banana models. Nano Banana 2 Lite generates 1K images at $0.034 each, about half the cost of Nano Banana 2 and roughly a quarter of the cost of Nano Banana Pro at the same resolution.
This model is multimodal. Use or to generate images alongside text responses.streamTextgenerateText
To use Nano Banana 2 Lite, set to in the :modelgoogle/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-imageAI SDK
Here is the example output from the above prompt:
You can also try Nano Banana 2 Lite in the .model playground
AI Gateway provides a unified API for calling models, tracking usage and cost, and configuring retries, failover, and performance optimizations for higher-than-provider uptime. It includes built-in , , , and more.custom reportingZero Data Retention supportbudgets for API keys
AI Gateway reflects provider pricing with no markup and does not charge a platform fee on inference, including on (BYOK) requests.Bring Your Own Key