Lite is both faster and cheaper. Nano Banana 2 Lite generates an image in about 4 seconds — 2.5x faster than standard Nano Banana 2 — at 3 cents per image, half the standard tier's cost and one-quarter of Nano Banana Pro's. The trade-off is 1K output resolution, which suits drafts and volume work, not final delivery.
On speed, Nano Banana 2 Lite generates an image in roughly 4 seconds — 2.5x faster than standard Nano Banana 2. On cost, it runs 3 cents per image: half the price of Nano Banana 2, one-quarter the price of Nano Banana Pro, and 4x cheaper than Pro at 1,000-image volume — 1,000 images for $30.
Metric | Nano Banana 2 Lite | Nano Banana 2 (Standard) | Nano Banana Pro |
|---|---|---|---|
Cost per image | 3 cents | 2x Lite's cost | 4x Lite's cost |
Generation speed | ~4 seconds (2.5x faster than Standard) | baseline | slowest, highest-quality tier |
Output resolution | 1K | higher | highest — final production tier |
The trade-off is resolution, not quality. Lite's 1K output is a deliberate design decision, not a quality failure — and on text-to-image quality, Google's own benchmarks show Nano Banana Lite outperforming Nano Banana Pro, so the cheapest tier is no longer the worst tier. What you give up is fine detail and output size for final assets, not concept accuracy.
Route by production stage. Use Lite for everything high-volume — mood boards, pre-visualization frames, product mockups, ad concept variants — and escalate only the selected winners to Nano Banana Pro for final production quality. In practice this changes the math: a D2C team can test 50 ad concept variants for less than the cost of a coffee instead of 5, find the winning creative, and reduce customer acquisition cost; for a filmmaker, iterating on 20 mood boards used to be a budget conversation and is now effectively free.
At 3 cents and 4 seconds per image, the practical constraint stops being budget and becomes context — across dozens of variations, the real risk is losing track of what you told the model three images earlier. All of these tiers run inside invideo, and the invideo agent holds your character sheets and brand direction across a high-volume session, routing exploration to Lite and final shots to Pro automatically.
Watch some of these to see what works for you:
the cheapest model is no longer the worst model
— invideo's creative team