Most "Seedance pricing" pages quote a per-second figure with no resolution attached. That number is unusable — the same model spans roughly a 10x cost range between 480p and 4K. Others quote reseller markups as if they were ByteDance's rates.
This page uses only the official BytePlus ModelArk rate card: per-token rates, per-video worked examples, and the two billing rules that actually move your invoice. If you are comparing a third-party quote, this is the baseline that shows you exactly what margin you are paying on top.
Short version: a 5-second 720p Seedance 2.5 clip costs $1.156. The same clip on Seedance 2.0 Mini costs $0.38. Which one you should be using depends entirely on whether you are drafting or delivering.
What This Article Solves
Three specific ways Seedance budgets go wrong:
- Pricing the flagship when a cheaper tier would have done the job — Mini is roughly 6x cheaper than 2.5 at comparable resolution.
- Getting surprised by video-conditioned generation, where cost scales with the length of the input clip, not just the output.
- Assuming "free" tiers scale. They are evaluation quotas, not production capacity.
Official Per-Token Rates
BytePlus bills Seedance by token. These are the published online-inference rates in USD per million tokens.
| Model ID | Input without video | Input with video |
|---|---|---|
dreamina-seedance-2-5-260628 | 10.70 (480p/720p) | 6.40 (480p/720p) |
dreamina-seedance-2-0-260128 | 7.0 (480p/720p) · 7.7 (1080p) · 4.0 (4K) | 4.3 · 4.7 · 2.4 |
dreamina-seedance-2-0-fast-260128 | 5.6 (480p/720p) | 3.3 |
dreamina-seedance-2-0-mini-260615 | 3.5 (480p/720p) | 2.1 |
seedance-1-5-pro-251215 | 2.4 with audio · 1.2 silent | — |
seedance-1-0-pro-250528 | 2.5 | — |
seedance-1-0-pro-fast-251015 | 1.0 | — |
Two counterintuitive things in that table.
Seedance 2.0 charges less per token at 4K (4.0) than at 720p (7.0) — yet a 4K clip costs about 5x more, because it consumes far more tokens. Per-token rates are not comparable across resolutions. Only per-video prices are.
"Input with video" has a lower rate but a higher bill. Video-conditioned generation bills at a reduced rate while consuming more tokens, and it is subject to minimum consumption floors tied to resolution, aspect ratio and output duration. That combination is why the ranges below climb so steeply.
Real Cost Per Video
This is the table to budget against. All figures are BytePlus published examples for 5-second, 16:9 output.
| Model | 480p | 720p | 1080p | 4K |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seedance 2.5 | $0.514 ($0.103/sec) | $1.156 ($0.231/sec) | — | — |
| Seedance 2.0 | $0.35 ($0.07/sec) | $0.76 ($0.15/sec) | $1.87 ($0.37/sec) | $3.89 ($0.78/sec) |
| Seedance 2.0 Fast | $0.28 ($0.06/sec) | $0.60 ($0.12/sec) | Not supported | Not supported |
| Seedance 2.0 Mini | $0.18 ($0.04/sec) | $0.38 ($0.08/sec) | Not supported | Not supported |
When you feed a video in as reference, the price scales with that input's length:
| Model | 480p | 720p | 1080p | 4K |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seedance 2.5 (2–30s input) | $0.553–2.152 | $1.244–4.838 | — | — |
| Seedance 2.0 (2–15s input) | $0.39–0.86 | $0.84–1.86 | $2.06–4.57 | $4.20–9.33 |
| Seedance 2.0 Fast (2–15s input) | $0.30–0.66 | $0.64–1.43 | Not supported | Not supported |
| Seedance 2.0 Mini (2–15s input) | $0.19–0.42 | $0.41–0.91 | Not supported | Not supported |
The low end of each range is 2–4 seconds of input video; the high end is the maximum. Note that Seedance 2.5 accepts up to 30 seconds of input against Seedance 2.0's 15 — which is why its top-end range nearly triples the base price. Teams referencing long source clips are the ones who get surprised.
The Cost Curve Across Four Generations
Line the flagships up chronologically and the direction is clear: Seedance gets more expensive with each flagship, not cheaper.
- Seedance 1.0 Pro Fast (Oct 2025): 1.0 per million tokens
- Seedance 1.5 Pro (Dec 2025): 1.2 silent / 2.4 with audio
- Seedance 2.0 (Jan 2026): 7.0 at 480p/720p
- Seedance 2.5 (Jul 2026): 10.70 at 480p/720p
ByteDance's answer to cost pressure has never been a flagship price cut. It has been cheaper tiers shipped alongside: Fast, Mini, and draft mode. Draft mode applies a conversion factor to token consumption — for Seedance 1.5 Pro, BytePlus documents 0.7 for silent video and 0.6 for audio video.
Plan accordingly: if a future Seedance release matters to your budget, expect the flagship rate to rise and the savings to arrive as a Fast or Mini variant a few months later. That is what happened with Seedance 2.0 Mini, which landed in June 2026, five months after the 2.0 flagship.
Is Seedance Free?
Partly, and the distinction matters.
Free for evaluation: yes. BytePlus documents a free token allowance per account ID, shared between its Experience Center and the API. That is enough to judge output quality before adding a payment method.
Free for production: no. Sustained generation is paid, and the free quota does not renew as a monthly production allowance.
Free in consumer apps: limited. Jimeng AI and Doubao offer limited free generations, but with the constraints you would expect from a consumer tier.
The genuinely cheap path is not a free tier — it is tier discipline. Draft at Seedance 2.0 Mini 480p ($0.18 per 5-second clip), converge on a prompt, then spend flagship money only on the take you have already validated. That single habit cuts more from a real production bill than any provider switch.
If you would rather skip API setup entirely — no Volcano Engine account, no key management, no minimum spend — you can run Seedance-family generation on credits in the AI video generator on this site, with per-generation costs listed on the pricing page. The Seedance 2.0 Mini workflow is the low-cost draft tier, and the Seedance 2.5 page covers what the current flagship adds.
How To Sanity-Check Any Seedance Quote
Five checks, ordered by how fast they kill a bad number:
- Find the model ID. Real pricing attaches to an identifier like
dreamina-seedance-2-5-260628. No ID means the quote is not traceable. - Check the resolution. A per-second price without one is unusable.
- Check whether video input is involved. It changes the rate, the token count, and the floor.
- Compare against the official row above. A price below the BytePlus rate means someone is subsidizing, sampling a cheaper tier, or quoting draft mode.
- Confirm the tier matches the job. Most "Seedance is expensive" complaints are flagship pricing applied to draft work.
FAQ
How much does Seedance 2.5 cost? $0.514 for a 5-second 480p clip and $1.156 at 720p, per BytePlus published examples. Token rates are 10.70 USD per million tokens without video input, 6.40 with.
What is the cheapest Seedance model? Seedance 2.0 Mini — $0.18 for a 5-second 480p clip, $0.38 at 720p.
Is Seedance 2.5 more expensive than 2.0? Yes. 10.70 versus 7.0 USD per million tokens at 480p/720p, and $1.156 versus $0.76 for a 5-second 720p clip.
Why does 4K cost less per token than 720p on Seedance 2.0? Because 4K consumes far more tokens per second of video. The lower rate is applied to a much larger token count, so the clip still costs about 5x more.
Does Seedance 2.5 support 1080p and 4K? BytePlus publishes 2.5 rates and per-video examples for 480p and 720p. Seedance 2.0 is the tier with published 1080p and 4K pricing.
Is there a free Seedance API tier? There is a free token quota per BytePlus account for evaluation, shared between the Experience Center and the API. It is not a production allowance.
Sources
Pricing changes without notice. Verify against these before committing budget.
- BytePlus ModelArk — Pricing — every per-token rate, per-video example, minimum consumption rule and draft-mode factor quoted above.
- BytePlus ModelArk — Video Generation API — the request parameters that determine billed token consumption.
- BytePlus ModelArk — seedance-1.0-pro-fast — resolution, duration and frame-rate limits.
- BytePlus ModelArk product page — platform availability and free-quota context.
- Volcano Engine model list — Chinese-market model IDs and tier structure.
- ByteDance Seed — Seedance 2.5 — the capability set this rate card prices, including 30-second generation.
- ByteDance Seed — Seedance 2.0 — audio-video joint generation and reference inputs.
- ByteDance Seed — Seedance — Seedance 1.0 baseline.
- Seedance 1.0 technical report (arXiv 2506.09113) — efficiency claims behind the 1.0 tier.
- TechNode — ByteDance launches Seedance 2.5 — launch date and rollout scope.
Verified against BytePlus documentation on August 4, 2026 by the seedance3ai.video editorial team. All prices are official list rates in USD; regional pricing, enterprise agreements and promotional credits may differ.