Guide

What one AI image actually costs.

Last updated · 5 September 2026

There are two ways to pay for generated images. You rent a seat somewhere and get a monthly credit pool, or you call the model's API and pay for exactly the images you made. The second number is knowable to the tenth of a cent, and this page is that number for the three image APIs we use, checked against each provider's own pricing page on 5 September 2026.

Nothing here is an estimate. Where a provider prices by token rather than by image, the provider's own worked example is quoted rather than our arithmetic.

The short answer

A single finished image at roughly 1024x1024, generated through the provider's API with your own key:

  • Nano Banana 2 Lite: $0.0336
  • Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image): $0.039
  • Grok Imagine Image: $0.02
  • Grok Imagine Image 2.0, low detail: $0.04
  • Nano Banana 2: $0.067
  • Grok Imagine Image Quality: $0.05
  • Nano Banana Pro: $0.134
  • GPT Image 2, medium quality: roughly 4 to 11 cents depending on size

So the spread across the whole field is about four cents to thirteen and a half cents per image at 1K. Resolution, not brand, is what moves the number most: the same model at 4K costs two to three times its 1K rate.

Google: the Nano Banana family

Google prices image output at a flat rate per million tokens and publishes the per-image equivalent for each resolution. Those published equivalents:

  • Nano Banana 2 Lite (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image), 1K: $0.0336
  • Nano Banana 2 (gemini-3.1-flash-image), 0.5K / 1K / 2K / 4K: $0.045 / $0.067 / $0.101 / $0.151
  • Nano Banana Pro (gemini-3-pro-image), 1K or 2K: $0.134; 4K: $0.24
  • Nano Banana (gemini-2.5-flash-image), up to 1024px: $0.039

Two costs sit outside that table and are easy to forget. Reference images you send in are billed as input: Nano Banana Pro sets image input at 560 tokens, which Google puts at $0.0011 per image. And text or thinking output is billed separately from the picture, at $3 per million tokens for Nano Banana 2 and $12 for Nano Banana Pro.

Google's Batch API is listed at a 50 percent cost reduction, so a queue of images you are willing to wait for costs half the rates above.

OpenAI: GPT Image 2

OpenAI does not publish a per-image price for GPT Image 2. It bills the image as output tokens, and the token count rises with size and quality, so the per-image figure is a range rather than a number:

  • Image output: $30.00 per 1M tokens
  • Image input: $8.00 per 1M tokens, $2.00 cached
  • Text input: $5.00 per 1M tokens, $1.25 cached

In practice medium quality lands around 4 to 11 cents per image across the usual sizes. If you need the exact figure for one specific size and quality, OpenAI's image generation guide carries a calculator that does the token arithmetic for you.

xAI: Grok Imagine

xAI prices per image, which makes it the easiest of the three to reason about:

  • Grok Imagine Image, 1K or 2K: $0.02 per image, plus $0.002 per input image
  • Grok Imagine Image Quality, 1K: $0.05; 2K: $0.07, plus $0.01 per input image
  • Grok Imagine Image 2.0, 1K low / 2K low / 1K medium / 2K medium: $0.04 / $0.06 / $0.06 / $0.08, plus $0.01 per input image

One xAI-specific cost is worth knowing before it surprises you: a request blocked by xAI's usage guidelines before anything is generated still carries a $0.05 fee. You can be charged for an image you never received.

Is there a free tier?

Not for the current image models at any of the three. Google's pricing page lists the free tier as unavailable for all four Nano Banana image models, and there is no free image tier at OpenAI to fall back on. The free tiers that do exist at Google cover text models, not image generation.

This catches people out because the chat products are a different purchase entirely. A ChatGPT or Gemini subscription does not come with API credit, and API billing does not come with the chat app.

Per-image billing or a monthly subscription?

The honest answer is that it depends on one number: how many images you finish in a month.

  • Under roughly a few hundred images a month, per-image API billing is almost always cheaper, and you pay nothing in the months you do not generate.
  • Above that, a platform subscription with a large credit pool can win on raw unit cost, if you actually use the pool. Unused credits are the hidden cost of a subscription.
  • Subscriptions also buy things a raw API does not: a hosted interface, presets, upscaling, and a queue someone else maintains.

We worked this through with the real numbers on both sides in the API versus subscription cost breakdown, and there is a per-provider walkthrough of what a hundred images costs in the Nano Banana without Firefly credits note.

Where these numbers come from

Every figure on this page was read off the provider's own pricing page on 5 September 2026. None of it is quoted from a third party, and none of it is inferred. Providers change these rates without notice, so treat the date as part of the fact:

If you spot a rate here that no longer matches the source, the source is right and this page is stale. Tell us and we will fix it.

Getting a key for each of these

Every price above assumes you are calling the API with your own key and paying the provider directly. Getting one takes a couple of minutes: Google Gemini, OpenAI, xAI.

Our own Photoshop plugin, Creator MAX, works this way on purpose: the key stays on your machine, the provider bills you at the rates above, and we add no markup and take no cut of the transaction.