Google ships Nano Banana 2.1
Google's Nano Banana 2.1 halves the developer price of a 1K image and posts its biggest gain on multi-character consistency, but every score is Google's own and its model card says consistency is still not always perfect.
Google's Nano Banana 2.1 costs half as much per 1K image as the model it replaces: $0.0336 at Google's developer rate, against $0.067 for Nano Banana 2. The bigger story for anyone building characters is consistency, since multi-character consistency scored 1106 in Google's own head-to-head preference test, against 978 for Nano Banana 2, the largest gain on its list.
Distribution was close to instant. Google announced it at noon Eastern on Oct 6; Krea had it live 34 minutes later, Higgsfield after 71 minutes and Pika inside three hours. One call takes up to 14 reference images, with consistency promised for four characters and ten objects, and mask edits change only the region you mark.
Keep the limits beside the claims. Every score is Google's own, and its model card says character consistency is still not always perfect and small text blurs at 1K. The 4K output the platform posts lead with is not new, because Nano Banana 2 reached 4K in February, and a 4K image now costs $0.113, a smaller cut than at 1K.
In practice, character sheets and keyframes for image-to-video get cheaper today, so generate more takes, but check every character shot to shot before you animate.
Source: Google DeepMind model card and Gemini developer pricing, Oct 6, 2026; Krea, Higgsfield and Pika posts on X.
