Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image now available via Vercel's unified API at $0.034 per 1K images—half the cost of prior Nano Banana, sub-4s latency, multimodal text+image in single call.
Summary
Reduces image generation costs and latency for production deployments while consolidating billing/retry logic through a single SDK call. Cuts iteration time on multimodal workflows that previously required separate model calls.
Why it matters
Reduces image generation costs and latency for production deployments while consolidating billing/retry logic through a single SDK call. Cuts iteration time on multimodal workflows that previously required separate model calls.
Implementation verdict
Replaces Nano Banana 2 for cost-sensitive image tasks. Requires setting `model` to `google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image` and adding `responseModalities: ['TEXT', 'IMAGE']` to provider options. Ready now—native AI SDK support, no breaking changes.
Sources
Dev Signal
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