Gemini 3.6 Flash Image (Nano Banana 2.1)
Google's new image model creates and edits pictures from text descriptions, available to developers and not free to download.
Key facts
- Released
- Oct 6, 2026
- What it does
- Text and chat: Writes, answers questions and holds a conversation.Thinks first: Can reason step by step before it answers: slower, but better at maths, code and tricky questions.Sees images: Understands pictures, screenshots and charts you share with it.Makes images: Creates pictures from a description, or edits them.
View moreView less
- How
- For developers, through an API
- Announced as
- “Gemini Nano Banana 2.1”
From trckr's archive of releases before it started watching. Date and details from Epoch AI's database of AI models (CC BY 4.0).
Price and limits
What developers pay to use it through the API: How developers plug a model into their own apps and pay per use. A model that's "in the API" can be used by programmers, even if it isn't in a chat app yet., per million Tokens: The small chunks of text a model reads and writes, about three-quarters of a word each. Prices and limits are counted in tokens. sent (input) or written back (output), and how much it can take in at once.
- Input
- $1.50
- per million tokens
- Output
- $7.50
- per million tokens
- Context window: How much a model can keep in mind at once: your question, any files you share and its own replies. Measured in tokens; 1,000 tokens is about 750 words.
- 66K tokens
- about 49,000 words
From OpenRouter, checked .
Compare Gemini 3.6 Flash Image (Nano Banana 2.1) with
It came out 98 days after Nano Banana 2 Lite, the lab's previous model.
The details
Gemini 3.6 Flash Image (Nano Banana 2.1) is Google's image model for Image generator: A model that creates or edits pictures from a written description., text-to-image, image editing, and video-to-image tasks, accessed through API: How developers plug a model into their own apps and pay per use. A model that's "in the API" can be used by programmers, even if it isn't in a chat app yet. access. Its size has not been disclosed.
Model ID: The exact name developers type to use a model, like gpt-5-mini. New IDs often show up in a lab's systems before the official announcement, which is how trckr spots many releases early.
google/gemini-nano-banana-2.1Timeline
/OpenRouterFirst signal
Get alerts like this the moment they happen.
From Google and every other major lab.