Yesterday I experimented with Nano Banana 2 for the storybook page creation. The character consistency and overall style were spot on. After that I tried using ComfyUI and I was not impressed by the results at all. It just looked like the state of AI was back in time to the end of 2025 instead.
In a couple of months the quality has shot up, which was easily seen in a comparison between Nano Banana 2 and ComfyUI results. So I made the easy decision to use a Google Nano Banana 2 pipeline instead of ComfyUI. A day’s work all for nothing, but in the end quality always wins.
I had to get a working API key from Google AI Studio, which was easy to obtain as long as you have a billing account.
I always get a low-key anxious feeling when I have to put my credit card in for API access. Having heard horror stories of people having tens of thousands of dollars spent without them being aware makes me hesitate my decision.
When I looked into the Google dashboard I saw my usage spike while trying out some API calls. I then checked the spend tab and it didn’t change! Strange, as I would expect to have racked up some costs at least. I read that cost information may take up to 24 hours to update. Wait what?
I want to be able to know what costs I have used up until any point in time. Not having to guess is an important thing with vibe coding. With vibe coding I have less insight into what Codex or Claude is actually doing. And no idea whether we’re racking up expensive API calls in the process.
Key Insight
I have a scarcity mindset when it comes to AI and API usage. And that’s a problem as this will slow me down in the near future when costs will go down exponentially. It is then programmed in my mind that I have to use it sparsely and limits my creativity. It’s the tools getting cheaper while my mindset stays expensive.