Google: Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image)

google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image

Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image) is Google's fastest, most cost-efficient Gemini image model, built for high-velocity developer pipelines and rapid-fire visual exploration. It delivers text-to-image generation in roughly 4 seconds — about 2.7× faster than Gemini 3.1 Flash Image — while keeping the character consistency, precise editing, and real-world knowledge of the Nano Banana family.

A single drop-in API handles text-to-image, image editing, and multi-image composition. As a multimodal model it also returns text alongside images. Outputs are generated at 1K resolution across 14 aspect ratios and carry an invisible SynthID watermark so they can be identified as AI-generated.

Positioned as the best balance of quality and speed in the Nano Banana 2 line, it lets you generate thousands of images at a fraction of the cost of heavier production models — ideal for prototyping, real-time apps, and visual workflows at scale.

Modalities

In / Out Price

$0.25 / $1.50per 1M

Context

66K

Released

Jun 30, 2026

Knowledge Cutoff

Jan 2025

Providers

Different companies host the same model. OpenRouter routes your request to one of them based on the routing mode you pick — Balanced (price + speed), Nitro (fastest), or Exacto (one fixed provider).

Effective Pricing

The chart below shows the average price customers are actually paying after prompt caching. Depending on the amount of repeated context you send, this can be 60–80% cheaper than the provider list price. Shown are rolling averages from the past 30 days.

Performance

Throughput is how fast the model writes (tokens per second — higher is better). Latency is total round-trip time (lower is better). TTFT is time-to-first-token — how long before you see anything appear (lower is better).

Uptime

Percent of requests that succeeded over the last 30 days. OpenRouter monitors every provider continuously and automatically retries on the next-best provider when one returns an error.

Apps

Public apps that send the most traffic to this model. Good signal for what real production workloads look like — and a hint at which use cases this model is best suited for.

Activity

Token volume and request traffic to this model over time.

Quick Start

Drop-in code to call this model. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. The only thing that changes between models is the model slug below.