
Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image) now on AI Gateway
Quick Answer
Google's Nano Banana 2 Lite is now available on AI Gateway, offering fast, multimodal image and text generation under 4 seconds at a cost of $0.034 per 1K images, significantly cheaper than its predecessors.
Quick Take
Google's Nano Banana 2 Lite is now available on AI Gateway, offering fast, multimodal image and text generation under 4 seconds at a cost of $0.034 per 1K images, significantly cheaper than its predecessors. This model supports advanced features like editing images over multiple turns and integrates seamlessly with the AI SDK.
Key Points
- Nano Banana 2 Lite generates images in under 4 seconds.
- Cost per 1K images is $0.034, half of Nano Banana 2's price.
- Supports multimodal responses with text and image generation.
- AI Gateway offers a unified API for model management and tracking.
- No markup on provider pricing, including BYOK requests.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readNano Banana 2 Lite from Google is now available on AI Gateway. 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.
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 streamText or generateText to generate images alongside text responses.
To use Nano Banana 2 Lite, set model to google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image in the AI SDK:
import { generateText } from 'ai';
const result = await generateText({
model: 'google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image',
providerOptions: {
google: { responseModalities: ['TEXT', 'IMAGE'] },
},
prompt: 'Vercel shipping container boat in 8-bit.',
});
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 custom reporting, Zero Data Retention support, budgets for API keys, and more.
AI Gateway reflects provider pricing with no markup and does not charge a platform fee on inference, including on Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) requests.
AI Gateway: Track top AI models by usage
The AI Gateway model leaderboard tracks the most popular models over time, ranking them by the total volume of tokens processed across all Gateway traffic.
View the leaderboard
— Originally published at vercel.com
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