Google halved its image price, and the 29 October shutdown date is not Google's

Google released Nano Banana 2.1 on 6 October. A 1K image falls from 6.70 cents to 3.36, a 2K image from 10.10 to 5.04, and a 4K image from 15.10 to 7.56. Batch pricing halves those again. At 2K that takes a thousand images from $101 to $50.40.

“The gemini-3.1-flash-image model is deprecated (no shutdown date announced). Migrate to gemini-nano-banana-2.1”

— Журнал изменений Gemini API, Google, 6 октября 2026

The date circulating in coverage is not in the changelog

Several write-ups give 29 October as the day the old model stops answering, 22 days from now. Google's own changelog says no shutdown date has been announced. Anyone scheduling a migration around 29 October is working from a number the vendor is not publishing.

We tested both names against the API this morning. gemini-nano-banana-2.1 answers and returns an image. gemini-3.1-flash-image also still answers, deprecated and running.

Read the error bars first

Google reports the Thinking variant at 1050 give or take 14 on overall text-to-image preference and 1106 give or take 14 on multi-character consistency, with infographic accuracy at 0.521. The error bars matter: with a 14-point band around 1050, a model scoring 1040 sits inside the same range.

The capability claims are more concrete. The multimodal AI takes up to 14 reference images at once and holds 4 characters and 10 objects consistent across them, and Google lists text rendering, wide panoramas and infographics as the areas it improved.

The pricing move is the bigger one

A deprecated model keeps working until the vendor says otherwise, and the cost of staying on it has doubled relative to the replacement. For a desk generating one image per published item the difference is cents. For anyone running thousands a week, the old model is a standing 50% surcharge on the same output.

Nano Banana Pro at 4K cost 24 cents a frame. The new Flash model at 4K costs 7.56, which is 68.5% less for the top resolution tier. A 4K frame now costs less than a 2K frame did last week.

We wrote on 1 October that Gemini 4 Argon arrived 333 days after the previous flagship and went to partners only. This release went the other way: generally available on day one, across the Gemini app, Search AI Mode, AI Studio, Flow, Stitch, Google Ads and the enterprise platform. The same company earns $7,119 a second in search, which is the budget that makes a 50% price cut a rounding decision.

Informational material, not investment advice. Prices are Google's published API rates, and the benchmark figures come from Google's own evaluation of the Thinking variant.