Budgeting an AI video pipeline around a model that has not shipped is a good way to blow a quarter. So let us start with the uncomfortable answer: there is no Seedance 3.0 price, because ByteDance has not announced Seedance 3.0. No model ID, no rate card, no launch date as of August 4, 2026.
What you can do — and what this page is for — is price the Seedance family accurately today, understand the cost curve across four generations, and derive a defensible budget range for whatever comes next. Every number below is pulled from the official BytePlus ModelArk pricing documentation, not from reseller markups or aggregator estimates. Reseller pricing sits on top of these rates; if you compare a third-party quote against this table, you will see exactly what margin you are paying.
What This Article Solves
Three specific problems the "Seedance pricing" pages tend to leave you with:
- They quote a per-second figure with no resolution attached, which is meaningless — the same model spans a 10x cost range across 480p and 4K.
- They quote reseller pricing as if it were ByteDance pricing.
- They ignore the two rules that actually move your bill: video-conditioned input pricing, and minimum token consumption floors.
This page fixes all three, then gives you a labeled estimate for 3.0 instead of a made-up number.
Official Seedance Token Rates (August 2026)
BytePlus bills Seedance by token, not by clip. These are the published online-inference rates in USD per million tokens.
| Model ID | Rate (input without video) | Rate (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 things in that table trip people up.
The 4K row looks wrong but is not. Seedance 2.0 charges less per token at 4K (4.0) than at 720p (7.0) — yet a 4K clip costs far more, because it consumes vastly more tokens. Per-token rates are not comparable across resolutions. Only per-video prices are.
"Input with video" is cheaper per token, not cheaper overall. Video-conditioned generation runs at a lower rate but consumes more tokens and is subject to minimum consumption floors, which is why the per-video ranges below climb so steeply with input length.
Actual Cost Per Video
This is the table that should drive your budget. 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, prices scale with the length of that input:
| 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 corresponds to 2–4 seconds of input video; the high end to the maximum input length. A single 720p 4K-adjacent workflow can therefore swing 4x on input length alone — which is why teams that reference long source clips get surprise invoices.
What the Cost Curve Actually Shows
Line the generations up chronologically and the trend is unambiguous: Seedance has gotten more expensive with every flagship release, 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
Flagship-to-flagship, the 480p/720p rate went from 2.5 (1.0 Pro) to 7.0 (2.0) to 10.70 (2.5). ByteDance's answer to cost pressure has not been to cut flagship prices — it has been to ship cheaper tiers alongside the flagship: Fast, Mini, and draft mode. Draft mode applies a conversion factor to token consumption; for Seedance 1.5 Pro, BytePlus documents factors of 0.7 for silent and 0.6 for audio video.
This directly contradicts the most-circulated Seedance 3.0 rumor, which claimed generation cost would drop to one-eighth of Seedance 2.0. Nothing in four generations of published rate cards supports that trajectory.
A Defensible Estimate for Seedance 3.0 Pricing
Labeled clearly: this is inference from the published curve, not a leak, not a quote, and not something to sign a contract against.
Working from flagship rates only — 2.5 (1.0 Pro) → 7.0 (2.0) → 10.70 (2.5) — the last two flagship transitions ran roughly 1.5x to 2.8x. If ByteDance holds that pattern and 3.0 ships with a meaningful capability jump, a 480p/720p flagship rate somewhere in the 13 to 25 USD per million tokens band is the reasonable planning envelope, with a cheaper Fast/Mini tier arriving alongside or shortly after.
Translated to what you would actually pay: a 5-second 720p clip at 2.5 costs $1.156 today. A 3.0 flagship in that band would plausibly land somewhere around $1.40 to $2.70 for the equivalent clip — and materially more if 3.0 raises default duration, since price scales with output length.
Three caveats that could break this estimate: a major architecture efficiency gain, a competitive price war in the video model market, or a 3.0 that launches enterprise-only with negotiated pricing rather than a public rate card. Treat the band as a budgeting guardrail, not a forecast.
The Cheapest Way To Run Seedance Work Today
If your goal is finished video rather than API integration, the per-token math is the wrong optimization. Three practical routes, cheapest first:
Draft at the lowest tier, finish at the highest. Seedance 2.0 Mini at 480p runs $0.18 per 5-second clip against $1.156 for a 2.5 720p clip — roughly 6x cheaper. Iterate prompts at Mini, then spend real budget only on the take you have already validated. This single habit cuts most production bills more than any provider switch.
Use the free quota before you commit. BytePlus documents a free token allowance per account ID, shared between its Experience Center and the API — enough to evaluate output quality before adding a payment method.
Skip API setup entirely for one-off work. If you need a handful of clips rather than a pipeline, the credit-based path is cheaper in practice once you account for engineering time: you can run Seedance-family text-to-video and image-to-video jobs in the Seedance 3.0 AI video generator with no Volcano Engine account, no key management, and no minimum spend. Current credit costs per generation are listed on the pricing page, and the Seedance 2.0 Mini option is the low-cost draft tier for prompt iteration.
How To Sanity-Check Any Seedance Price You See
A quick method that has caught every bad quote I have run it against:
- Find the model ID. Real pricing is always attached to an identifier like
dreamina-seedance-2-5-260628. A page quoting "Seedance pricing" with no model ID is quoting something else. - Check the resolution. Any per-second price without a resolution attached is unusable — the same model spans roughly 10x between 480p and 4K.
- Check whether video input is involved. It changes both the rate and the floor.
- Compare against the official row. If a provider's price is below the BytePlus rate, ask what they are subsidizing or what tier they are actually serving.
- Confirm there is no "3.0" row. If a page prices Seedance 3.0 with a straight face, everything else on it is unverified too.
FAQ
How much does Seedance 3.0 cost? It has no price. ByteDance has not announced the model, and no rate card exists in BytePlus or Volcano Engine documentation.
How much does Seedance 2.5 cost per video? Per BytePlus published examples, a 5-second 16:9 clip costs $0.514 at 480p and $1.156 at 720p. Video-conditioned generation ranges from $0.553 to $4.838 depending on resolution and input length.
What is the cheapest Seedance model? Among current tiers, Seedance 2.0 Mini — $0.18 for a 5-second 480p clip, $0.38 at 720p.
Is Seedance free? Not on a production basis. BytePlus provides a free token quota per account for evaluation, and consumer apps carrying Seedance offer limited free generations, but sustained generation is paid.
Why is 4K cheaper per token than 720p on Seedance 2.0? Because per-token rates and total cost are different things. 4K consumes far more tokens per second of video, so a 4K clip costs about 5x a 720p clip despite the lower rate.
Will Seedance 3.0 be cheaper than 2.5? Nothing in the published four-generation price history suggests flagship prices fall. Cost relief has consistently come from Fast, Mini and draft tiers rather than from flagship discounts.
Sources
Pricing changes without notice. Verify against these before committing budget.
- BytePlus ModelArk — Pricing — all per-token rates, per-video examples, minimum consumption rules and draft-mode conversion factors quoted above.
- BytePlus ModelArk — seedance-1.0-pro-fast — resolution, duration and frame-rate limits for the 1.0 Fast tier.
- BytePlus ModelArk — Video Generation API — request parameters that determine billed token consumption.
- BytePlus ModelArk product page — platform availability and account setup.
- Volcano Engine model list — Chinese-market Seedance model IDs and tier structure.
- ByteDance Seed — Seedance 2.5 — capability set that the 2.5 rate card is priced against.
- ByteDance Seed — Seedance 2.0 — audio-video joint generation and reference input support.
- ByteDance Seed — Seedance — Seedance 1.0 baseline capabilities.
- Seedance 1.0 technical report (arXiv 2506.09113) — architecture and efficiency claims behind the 1.0 tier.
- TechNode — ByteDance launches Seedance 2.5 — dated launch confirmation and rollout scope.
Last verified against BytePlus documentation on August 4, 2026 by the Seedance 3.0 AI editorial team. All prices are official list rates in USD; regional pricing, enterprise agreements and promotional credits may differ.