Hitting Nano Banana Pro image limits in Gemini faster than before? Here’s why it’s happening

If you’ve tried generating images with Gemini’s Nano Banana Pro model in the last 48 hours, you might have hit a wall much sooner than expected. A growing number of Pro subscribers are reporting that they are being capped after generating as few as 15 to 25 images, a massive drop from the typical daily allowance.

To make matters more confusing, the interface isn’t always telling you what’s happening. Instead of the standard “quota exceeded” pop-up, users are seeing the Nano Banana Pro toggle simply become unselectable, or the system silently switches them back to the standard model without warning.

When Google launched the Pro tier, the marketing — and the user experience — suggested a generous image generation limit per day. Until very recently, power users were routinely hitting 70 to 90 generations before seeing a cooldown timer.

Now, threads on r/Bard and r/GeminiAI are flooded with confused subscribers. Users like BroKenLight6 and Live-Fee-8344 noted that the hard stop is hitting around the 20-image mark. It’s a jarring shift for people paying for a “Pro” service, essentially gatekeeping the high-fidelity features they subscribed for.

We haven’t seen an official press release explaining the change, but the writing is on the wall (and in the support docs). As spotted by Reddit user Gaiden206, Google’s support page explicitly states that limits may change “without notice” during periods of “large increase in activity.”

So, why the sudden throttle? It’s likely a perfect storm of holiday demand. We’ve seen a wave of free 1-year Pro subscriptions bundled with student accounts and new smartphone purchases recently.

I suspect the server load is also being exacerbated by third-party services. Some paid image-gen sites ran “unlimited” Black Friday promos (1,2,3) that rely on Google’s backend, potentially clogging the API queue for everyone else.

This matters because consistency is the bedrock of a paid subscription. When a tool fluctuates between being a creative powerhouse and a limited demo, it becomes impossible to rely on for professional workflows.

This congestion aligns with other moves Google has made recently to preserve bandwidth, such as killing free API access for Gemini 2.5 Pro. We’re hoping this is just a temporary bottleneck while Google provisions more hardware, but for now, you might want to be a little more selective with your prompts.

Featured image generated with AI