Seedance 2.5 Pricing: 53% More Per Token Than Seedance 2.0

Seedance 2.5 pricing went live on ByteDance's docs ahead of the model's August 7 API launch, and it lands at $10.70 per million tokens without video input, against $7.00 for Seedance 2.0^[1]. That is 52.9% more expensive per token for the same two resolutions.

The per-token framing matters more than it sounds, because AI video is quoted per second and metered per token. The gap between those two units is where most cost surprises live, and Seedance 2.5 widens it in a way that breaks any conversion factor you built for 2.0.

TL;DR

• Seedance 2.5 costs $10.70 per million tokens without video input and $6.40 with it, against $7.00 and $4.30 for Seedance 2.0 — 52.9% and 48.8% increases^[1].
• Only 480p and 720p are published for 2.5. No 1080p or 4K rate exists yet, and offline inference is marked "not supported yet"^[1].
• Billing runs on (input_video_seconds + output_seconds) × width × height × fps / 1024, with fps fixed at 24^[1]. Your reference clip is metered exactly like generated frames.
• 480p changed frames between versions. Back-solving ByteDance's own worked examples puts 2.5 at ~854×480 and 2.0 at a taller frame, which is why 480p rises 46% per second while the token rate rises 53%.
• 2.5 accepts up to 30 seconds of reference video, double 2.0's 15. A five-second 720p job runs $1.244 with a short reference and $4.838 with a 30-second one^[1].
• Seedance 2.0 on reAPI runs $0.023 to $0.780 per billable second depending on tier^[2].

Seedance 2.5 pricing, and the rate that looks wrong

ByteDance publishes token rates per model and input mode^[1]:

Seedance 2.5 occupies a single row because it ships with a single rate. Read the 4K row underneath it again, though: it is the cheapest tier per token by a wide margin, 43% below 480p.

It is also, by a wide margin, the most expensive output you can buy. A 3840×2160 frame carries 19.4 times the pixels of what 480p actually renders. The rate falls 43% while the token count rises 1940%. Anyone comparing providers by scanning the rate column will conclude 4K is a bargain, and will be wrong by a factor of eleven.

This is the recurring hazard with token-metered video. The number on the price sheet is only half of the multiplication.

Where the tokens come from

The formula ByteDance documents is^[1]:

tokens = (input_video_seconds + output_seconds) × width × height × fps / 1024

Frame rate is fixed at 24. Pixel dimensions per label:

Checking the formula against a published example: five seconds of 720p on 2.0 with no reference is 5 × 21,600 = 108,000 tokens, times $7.00 per million, or $0.756. ByteDance's own worked example for that exact configuration reads $0.756^[1]. The formula is exact, not an approximation.

The 480p frame changed and nobody announced it

This one is not in the release notes. It falls out of dividing ByteDance's worked examples by their own token rates.

Their published five-second, 16:9, no-reference examples^[1]:

Divide each price by its token rate to recover the token count, then by 24/1024 to recover pixels. Seedance 2.5 lands at 9,607 tokens per second of 480p, roughly 854×480. Seedance 2.0 lands at about 10,057, a slightly taller frame.

720p resolves to 21,600 tokens per second on both, which is exactly 1280×720. That the same arithmetic produces a clean, verifiable number at 720p is what makes the 480p result trustworthy rather than a rounding artifact.

The consequence: at 720p, where the frame is unchanged, per-second cost rises by the same 53% as the token rate. At 480p, where the frame shrank about 4.5%, per-second cost rises only 46%. If you carry a per-second conversion factor from 2.0 to 2.5, it is wrong at 480p by roughly five percent, in your customer's favor if you are lucky and yours if you are not.

Your reference clip bills like generated video

input_video_seconds sits inside the same parenthesis as the output. A reference-to-video job pays for the source you uploaded at the identical rate as the frames the model invented.

Providers present this as a discounted per-second rate for reference mode, which reads as a bargain right up until you total it. Seedance 2.5's own published range makes the point without help: a five-second 720p generation costs $1.244 with a short reference and $4.838 with a 30-second one^[1]. Same output, 3.9 times the invoice.

Seedance 2.5 also widened the input window to 30 seconds, where 2.0 caps at 15^[1]. The ceiling on a single job roughly doubled alongside it.

There is a floor as well, and it is unpublished as a number. ByteDance's examples price two-second and four-second inputs identically, which implies a minimum around four seconds. The docs point at a spreadsheet calculator instead of stating it^[1]. If you resell this, customers sending two-second clips cost you more than your arithmetic predicts.

What Seedance 2.0 costs per second today

Until 2.5 opens, 2.0 is what you can actually call. Per second of billable duration on reAPI, in USD^[2][3]:

Multiplied to a minute, that spans $1.38 to $46.80, a 34x range. Worth internalizing before you pick a default resolution for a product, because that decision compounds across every generation your users trigger.

Per-minute figures are a unit conversion rather than a purchasable thing, incidentally. A single generation caps at 15 seconds, so a minute of finished video is four clips minimum and realistically more once you discard the bad takes.

The practical move is to stop paying flagship rates while you are still hunting for the prompt. Mini at 480p is 18 cents for five seconds. The same five seconds at 4K is $3.90. Parameters are identical across the family, so iterating cheap and rendering expensive costs one model-id change. Twenty iterations at Mini plus one 4K render is $7.50; twenty iterations at 4K is $78.

FAQ

When does Seedance 2.5 launch?

The API opens August 7, 2026. Pricing was published ahead of it^[1].

How much does Seedance 2.5 cost per second?

At the published rates, roughly $0.103 per second at 480p and $0.231 at 720p for a five-second clip with no reference video^[1]. Reference video adds your input duration to the billed total.

Does Seedance 2.5 support 1080p or 4K?

No published rate exists for either as of August 5, 2026. Only 480p and 720p appear on the pricing page^[1].

Why is 4K cheaper per token than 480p?

Unexplained by the vendor, and it does not apply to Seedance 2.5 anyway, which publishes one rate covering both its resolutions. On 2.0, what matters is that the token count rises far faster than the rate falls, so 4K remains the most expensive output despite the lowest rate.

Is Seedance 2.0 being retired?

Nothing announced. Its rates and capabilities stand, and 1080p and 4K currently exist only there.

How do I estimate a job before running it?

Compute (input_seconds + output_seconds) × tokens_per_second from the pixel table, multiply by the rate, divide by a million. Then bill downstream on the returned usage.completion_tokens, since the formula is an estimate until the job finishes^[1].

Does a failed generation still cost money?

On reAPI, no. Failed jobs refund automatically^[3].

Budgeting for the switch

The honest summary is that Seedance 2.5 pricing represents a real increase rather than a repackaging: 53% more per token, 46 to 53% more per second depending on resolution, and no 1080p or 4K option at launch. Whether that is worth paying depends on output quality nobody outside ByteDance has measured yet.

What you can do before August 7 is fix your arithmetic. Rebuild your per-second conversion from the 2.5 pixel dimensions rather than inheriting the 2.0 factor, budget reference jobs on input plus output, and meter customers on returned token counts instead of estimates. Those three corrections cover most of the gap between a quote and an invoice, and they apply whatever Seedance 2.5 pricing settles at once the model is actually live.

References

1. BytePlus. ModelArk — model pricing (token rates, calculation formula, and per-video examples). Retrieved August 2026 from docs.byteplus.com/en/docs/ModelArk/1544106
2. reAPI. Seedance 2.0 — model page and live pricing. Retrieved August 2026 from reapi.ai/models/seedance-2-0
3. reAPI. Seedance 2.0 Mini — model page and live pricing. Retrieved August 2026 from reapi.ai/models/seedance-2-0-mini
4. BytePlus. ModelArk — Seedance 2.0 API reference (resolution, duration and pixel dimensions). Retrieved August 2026 from docs.byteplus.com/en/docs/ModelArk/1520757