I Switched My AI Image Model and the Cost Went Up 6.7x — Here's Why I Did It Anyway

You know that feeling when you find a better tool, but the pricing page makes you close the tab? I run RepoClip , a SaaS that generates promo videos from GitHub repos using AI. The pipeline analyzes source code with Gemini, generates scene images, adds narration, and renders a video — all automatically. Images are at the center of the output quality. Every video has 6 scene images, and they're what users see first. I'd been using FLUX.2 [dev] via Fal.ai for image generation since launch. It worked. Then I saw that Nano Banana 2 — Google's new image model — had landed on Fal.ai. I decided to test it with the exact same prompt. The results were not close. Same Prompt, Different Universe I built a comparison script that runs the same prompt through both models across 4 visual styles (Tech, Realistic, Minimal, Vibrant). Here's the prompt: "A digital dashboard showing interconnected data nodes and flowing information streams, representing an intelligent automation platform that connects mul