AionLabs Aion 3.5 Mini vs Google Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image)
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image) is 1.6× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Aion 3.5 Mini accepts longer prompts: 262K vs 66K tokens.
- Aion 3.5 Mini is the newer model (released 2026-09-23).
| Aion 3.5 Mini | Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image) | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | AionLabs | |
| Released | 2026-09-23 | 2026-06-30 |
| Input / 1M | $0.70 | $0.25 |
| Output / 1M | $1.40 | $1.50 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.18 | — |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.875 | $0.563 |
| Context | 262K | 66K |
| Max output | 33K | 59K |
| Accepts | text | text, image |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 2 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $1.40 | $1.50 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 99.93% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | Operational |
Cost calculator
Aion 3.5 Mini
$63.00 per month$2.10 per day
Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image)
$37.50 per month$1.25 per day
Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image) saves $25.50 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Aion 3.5 Mini with
Compare Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image) with