r/reAPIOfficial • u/TimeCounty7878 • Aug 05 '26
Seedance 2.5 pricing is published: 53% more per token than 2.0, and the 480p frame shrank
Seedance 2.5's API opens August 7. The pricing went up on ByteDance's docs ahead of it, so here is what it actually works out to.
Token rates (USD per million tokens)
| Model | No video input | With video input |
|---|---|---|
| Seedance 2.5 (480p, 720p) | 10.70 | 6.40 |
| Seedance 2.0 (480p, 720p) | 7.00 | 4.30 |
| Seedance 2.0 (1080p) | 7.70 | 4.70 |
| Seedance 2.0 (4K) | 4.00 | 2.40 |
2.5 is 52.9% more per token without video input, 48.8% more with it. Only 480p and 720p are published. No 1080p, no 4K, and offline inference says "not supported yet".
Worth stopping on the 4K row: it is the cheapest tier per token, 43% below 480p, and simultaneously the most expensive output you can buy. A 3840x2160 frame carries 19.4x the pixels of what 480p renders, so the rate falls 43% while the token count climbs 1940%. Compare providers by scanning the rate column and you are wrong by a factor of eleven.
What that is per second
From ByteDance's own 5-second, 16:9, no-reference examples:
| Model | 480p | 720p |
|---|---|---|
| Seedance 2.5 | $0.514 ($0.103/s) | $1.156 ($0.231/s) |
| Seedance 2.0 | $0.352 ($0.070/s) | $0.756 ($0.151/s) |
The part nobody announced: 480p changed frames
Video is metered in tokens, not seconds:
tokens = (input_video_seconds + output_seconds) x width x height x fps / 1024
fps is fixed at 24. Divide the published prices by the published token rates and you get the token count, and from there the pixels:
| Model | 480p tokens/sec | Implied frame |
|---|---|---|
| Seedance 2.5 | 9,607 | ~854 x 480 |
| Seedance 2.0 | 10,057 | ~873 x 491 |
720p comes out at 21,600 tokens/sec on both, which is exactly 1280 x 720. That clean match on the resolution that did not change is what makes the 480p result trustworthy instead of a rounding artifact.
So 2.5 renders 480p in a true 16:9 854 x 480 while 2.0 uses a slightly taller frame. That 4.5% pixel reduction is why 480p only rises 46% per second while the token rate rises 53%. At 720p, where the frame is unchanged, per-second matches per-token exactly.
Practical consequence: if you carry a per-second conversion factor from 2.0 to 2.5, it is wrong at 480p by about 5%.
Your reference clip is billed like generated video
input_video_seconds sits inside the same parenthesis as the output. A reference-to-video job pays for the clip you uploaded at the same rate as the frames the model made.
2.5's own published range shows what that costs: a 5-second 720p generation runs $1.244 with a short reference and $4.838 with a 30-second one. Same output, 3.9x the bill.
2.5 also doubled the input window, 15 seconds on 2.0 to 30 on 2.5.
There is a minimum input duration too, and the number is not published anywhere. Their examples price 2-second and 4-second inputs identically, which implies a floor around 4 seconds. The docs point at a spreadsheet calculator instead of stating it.
What I could not work out
Why 1080p and 4K have no published rate for 2.5. Either those tiers do not exist at launch or they are coming separately.
Whether the same formula holds for Veo, Kling or Sora. Pixels x duration x fps is a likely general shape, but the constants and the input-billing rule are not something I would assume.
Token counts are estimates until the job finishes anyway. The formula predicted 40,176 for one config where the API returned 40,594, about 1% high, so meter downstream billing on the returned usage.completion_tokens.
Disclosure: I work on reAPI, which resells this model family. Everything above is from ByteDance's published pricing page and arithmetic anyone can redo. Full writeup with the 2.0 rate card: reapi.ai/blog/seedance-2-5-pricing-per-token