Nano Banana 2.1: Product Shots With Edit Chains in Python

Google shipped Nano Banana 2.1 on October 6, 2026, and the number that got developers talking is the price: image output dropped to $30 per million tokens, which works out to about $0.034 for a 1K image, half what Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) charged. The older model also shows up on Google's deprecation schedule with an earliest possible shutdown of October 29, so a lot of teams have three weeks to move.

This guide builds something concrete with it: a small product-shot pipeline. You generate one hero image, then derive every colorway and every translated-label variant from it with edit chains (each edit references the previous interaction instead of re-describing the scene). You will also add a hard budget guard, so a loop bug cannot quietly burn money.