Uni-1 vs Nano Banana Pro: Price and Availability Compared

The search "Uni-1 vs Nano Banana Pro" usually comes from one of two places: a designer comparing image quality, or a builder deciding which API to wire into a product. Those are different questions, and in October 2026 the second one has a factual answer before quality even enters the discussion. Uni-1 is available inside Luma's own product, and its API is a waitlist. Nano Banana Pro is available through Google's paid Gemini API today.

This page compares what each provider publishes: where the model runs, what it charges per image, what each one emphasises, and what this independent site can actually generate. Every figure was read from the two official pages on 21 October 2026. We did not run a head-to-head image test, so nothing below claims that one model looks better than the other.

The short answer

Choose Nano Banana Pro today if you need a callable image API, per-image pricing you can put in a unit-economics sheet, and a model that Google supports with search grounding. Consider Uni-1 if you are already inside Luma's product, if you want to evaluate its unified reasoning approach, or if you are willing to join the API waitlist and build later.

That is an availability answer, not a quality verdict. Uni-1's published samples and its "unified intelligence" framing may be a better fit for some creative work. But a model that cannot be called from your backend is not a production dependency, and a comparison that ignores that difference is not useful to a builder.

What Uni-1 is, according to Luma

Luma describes Uni-1 as "a multimodal reasoning model that can generate pixels", built on what the company calls Unified Intelligence. The page says the model "understands intention, responds to direction, and thinks with you". Its navigation groups the pitch under three words: Intelligent, Directable and Cultured. Luma also publishes a technical report and a showcase, and the page positions Uni-1 against stitched pipelines that combine separate models for understanding, planning and rendering.

Those are the provider's claims, and they are worth reading in full rather than reducing to a slogan. The useful part for a buyer is the product shape: Uni-1 is presented as a reasoning model that also outputs images, not as an image model with a chat wrapper. If your workflow depends on multi-step scene reasoning, reference images or iterative direction, that framing is the reason to test it.

The availability boundary is explicit. Luma's page offers "Try Uni-1 Now" inside its product, and the API section says "Get API Access" with a waitlist form: "Join the waitlist to get early API access to Uni-1.1. We'll notify you when API is available." The footer of the same page says "Available only from Luma". As of 21 October 2026, that is the public state: product access, waitlisted API.

What Nano Banana Pro is, according to Google

Nano Banana Pro is Google's public name for Gemini 3 Pro Image. Google's pricing page describes it as "our native image generation model, optimized for speed, flexibility, and contextual understanding". The model is listed in the Gemini API, can be tried in Google AI Studio, and is priced per output image on the paid tier.

Google's page also lists "Grounding with Google Search" as a feature for Gemini 3 Pro Image, with 5,000 free search requests per month shared across Gemini 3 and newer models, then $14 per 1,000 requests. That matters for product photography, current-events visuals and any prompt where the model needs facts it was not trained on. It is a capability Luma's Uni-1 page does not advertise in the same terms.

The trade is model scope. Nano Banana Pro is an image generation and editing model inside a larger Gemini family. Uni-1 is presented as a single unified model for reasoning and generation. Neither description settles which output you will prefer; they describe different product bets.

Price per image, from the official pages

Both providers publish enough detail to compare a single output image. The table keeps the units exactly as published and does not blend them into a made-up average.

The Luma numbers come from its "Equivalent per-image price" table, which is based on billing token counts: each input or output image is 2,000 billing tokens at current settings. The page lists $0.0909 for text to image at 2048px, $0.0933 for an image edit, $0.0933 for a multi-reference request with one input image, $0.0957 with two input images, and $0.1101 with eight input images. Its raw token prices are $0.50 per million text input tokens, $1.20 per million image input tokens, $3.00 per million text and thinking output tokens, and $45.45 per million image output tokens.

The Google numbers come from the Gemini API pricing page: Gemini 3 Pro Image lists $2.00 per million text or image input tokens, $12.00 per million text and thinking output tokens, $120.00 per million image output tokens, and an equivalent of $0.134 per 1K or 2K image and $0.24 per 4K image. Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) lists $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.039 per output image, or $0.0195 in batch.

For scale, 100 text-to-image outputs at 2048px cost about $9.09 on Uni-1's published equivalent rate, before input tokens. The same 100 outputs cost $13.40 on Nano Banana Pro at 1K or 2K, or $3.90 on Nano Banana. That arithmetic is ours; the unit prices are the providers'. Input images, retries and failed generations add cost on both sides, and neither provider promises that a request produces a usable result on the first try.

What the prices do not tell you

Three costs are missing from every per-image comparison. The first is the cost of a retry. A model that needs three attempts to satisfy a brief costs three times the published rate, and the retry rate depends on your prompt discipline and the model's behaviour, not on the price list. The second is resolution. A 2048px output and a 4K output are not interchangeable for print, and the cheaper per-image number may be the smaller file. The third is access. A waitlisted API has an opportunity cost that no price table captures.

There is also a licensing question. Both providers publish terms that govern commercial use, model output and attribution, and those terms can change. Before putting generated images on a product page or in an ad, read the current terms rather than relying on a summary. This page does not restate either licence because a summary would be worse than the source.

What this site actually runs

uni1ai.pro is an independent guide and hosted workspace, not Luma's official site. Its pricing page states the boundary plainly: the hosted studio runs Seedream 5 and Seedance 1.5 Pro, with Nano Banana Pro, Nano Banana and Veo 3.1 as fallbacks. Luma's Uni-1 API is not public yet, so outputs from this site are not Luma Uni-1 generations.

That disclosure is the reason this page can compare the two models honestly. The workspace does not pretend to sell Uni-1 access it does not have. It offers credit packs for the workflows it can run, and its pricing page shows the per-task credit cost before generation. If your goal is to try a Uni-1-style workflow today, the workspace is a way to work with current image and video models; if your goal is specifically to call Luma's model, the waitlist is the only public route.

The site's plans are one-time credit packs rather than a subscription: $9.90 for 500 credits, $29 for 5,000 credits and $99 for 50,000 credits at the prices shown on 21 October 2026, with higher list prices struck through on the same page. The free browser tools are separate from paid generation. Check the pricing page for the current credit cost of the model and resolution you intend to use.

Which model fits which job

The decision is easier when you separate the job from the model's marketing.

• You need an API in production this month. Choose Nano Banana Pro or Nano Banana. Uni-1's API is a waitlist, and a waitlist cannot serve a launch date.
• You want the cheapest published output image. Nano Banana at $0.039 per image is the lowest of the three published rates. Check whether its quality and resolution meet your brief before choosing on price alone.
• You need 4K output. Nano Banana Pro publishes a $0.24 per-image 4K rate. Luma's pricing section lists 2048px equivalents, so ask about higher resolutions before assuming availability.
• You need a model that can search the web while generating. Nano Banana Pro lists Google Search grounding. Uni-1's page does not describe the same feature.
• You want to evaluate unified reasoning and direction. Try Uni-1 in Luma's product and join the API waitlist if the workflow proves useful.
• You want to run a current image or video workflow without touching an API. Use this site's hosted workspace and read the credit cost before generating.

How to verify this comparison

Prices and availability change faster than articles. The two primary sources are Luma's Uni-1 page and Google's Gemini API pricing page, both read on 21 October 2026. Luma's page carries the model description, the token prices, the per-image equivalents and the API waitlist. Google's page carries the Gemini 3 Pro Image prices, the free-tier exclusion and the search-grounding terms.

We did not create a Luma API account, because there is no public API to create one against. We did not buy Gemini API credits or run a generation on either model. The per-image figures are the providers' published equivalents, and the 100-image arithmetic is a multiplication of those figures. If a provider changes its rate card, the table above should be rebuilt from the new page rather than adjusted by memory.

Bottom line

Uni-1 and Nano Banana Pro are both credible image models with published prices, but they are not interchangeable today. Nano Banana Pro is the model a developer can call now, at a known per-image price, with search grounding available. Uni-1 is the model to evaluate inside Luma's product and to revisit when the Uni-1.1 API opens. This site runs neither Luma Uni-1 nor a hidden substitute for it; it runs Seedream and Seedance workflows with named fallbacks, and says so before you pay.