Nano Banana API pricing in 2026: what an image actually costs
2 min readWritten by Unified Image API Team
Nano Banana (Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) is one of the most used image-generation models of the last year, and most teams reach it through an API reseller rather than Google's own billing. Pricing across providers looks confusing because everyone quotes a different unit: per image, per megapixel, per token, per credit. This post normalises everything to US dollars per image.
Our pricing
We meter in credits. You buy a pack once, and each image costs a fixed number of credits by resolution tier. A tier is what you ask for — "resolution": "1K" — and the aspect ratio is a separate field ("ratio": "16:9") that never changes the price:
| Resolution | Nano Banana | Nano Banana Pro |
|---|---|---|
| 1K | 2 credits | 4 credits |
| 2K | — | 6 credits |
| 4K | — | 8 credits |
What a credit costs depends on the pack: the Starter pack works out to $0.018 per credit, and the Scale pack to $0.0125. So a 1K Nano Banana image costs $0.025–0.036, and a 1K Pro image $0.05–0.072, depending only on how many credits you buy at once. There are no subscriptions, no minimum monthly spend, and no expiry.
Two properties matter more than the headline number:
- Failed jobs are free. Credits are reserved when you submit and refunded automatically if generation fails or you cancel. You only pay for images you receive.
- The price is the whole price. Storage of results, webhooks, and the dashboard are included; presigned download URLs carry no bandwidth charge.
How that compares
List prices of other routes to the same model, checked on 2026-08-30 (follow the links for current numbers):
| Provider | Model | List price / image |
|---|---|---|
| Google (official) | Nano Banana | ~$0.039 |
| Google (official) | Nano Banana Pro | from ~$0.134 (4K rate) |
| kie.ai | Nano Banana | ~$0.02 |
| PiAPI | Nano Banana Pro | from ~$0.105 |
Prices move often in this market — treat the table as a snapshot, not a promise. The honest summary: we are meaningfully cheaper than Google's official rate, and competitive with other resellers once you factor in free failures and included storage.
Estimating a real workload
A product generating 1,000 images a day at 1K on Nano Banana consumes 2,000 credits daily. On the Scale pack that is $25/day; the same volume at Google's official rate is $39/day. If ~3% of your jobs fail (a normal rate for prompt-heavy traffic), the refund policy saves you the difference instead of billing you for noise.
Ready to check against your own numbers? The pricing page shows live per-model rates, and the Nano Banana API page has a copy-paste quick start.