Seedance 2.5 API pricing: ByteDance lists none, Sume reserves by size

What ByteDance publishes

The ByteDance Seed announcement for Seedance 2.5 (read 2026-10-05) describes audio-video joint generation, up to 30 seconds per generation, and per-pass references of up to 30 images, 10 video clips and 10 audio clips. On availability it says the model is rolling out on Jimeng AI, Doubao Pro and other platforms, with API access coming soon via BytePlus ModelArk.

The page states no price, no free tier and no API rate. So there is no vendor figure to quote for "Seedance 2.5 API pricing" from that source, and anything you read elsewhere should be checked against the provider that bills you.

What Sume bills

Sume lists seedance-2.5 in the Video Router catalog at 4 to 30 seconds and 480p, 720p or 1080p (Video Router docs). Every catalog model is billed at provider list times 1.25, and the estimate is reserved when the job is accepted.

Seedance is priced per 1,000 video tokens rather than per second. Sume's pricing table has 720p at a list rate of $0.0214 per 1,000 tokens and 1080p at $0.0234. Working from 24 frames per second at 1280x720 and 1920x1080, that gives about 21,600 and 48,600 tokens per second. The per-second figures below are that arithmetic with the 1.25 factor applied; the figure that counts is the one the submit reserves.

Why 1080p jumps

Two things move at once. A 1080p frame carries 2.25 times the pixels of a 720p frame, and the token rate per 1,000 tokens is also higher. The result is roughly 2.46 times the 720p price for the same length. A 30-second 1080p job is $42.65 and will return 402 insufficient_credits on a wallet below that.

Checking before you spend

• Read GET /v1/videos/models and look at pricing_skus for the live token rate.
• Read GET /v1/balance first; the balance is in USD.
• Submit with an Idempotency-Key, so a network retry does not create a second paid job.
• After the job, call GET /v1/usage?job_id=... and quote debited_usd, not your own estimate.

Reading a missing price correctly

A launch page without a price is not a hidden price list. The ByteDance page is an announcement of capabilities and rollout channels; the API is described as coming soon, so there may be no public API price yet to quote. A buyer searching "seedance 2.5 api pricing" is really asking two things: what the provider will charge when its API opens, and what a model costs through an intermediary today. The first has no source in the page I read. The second is answerable now, from Sume's own rate table and the reserve that a submit creates.

This split also protects your budget model. Provider prices change when an API leaves preview, and Sume's docs say the live price is in the catalog and the OpenAPI, not in a blog post. Treat any table here as a snapshot dated 2026-10-05.

A budget for a thirty-clip test

Thirty 10-second clips at 720p reserve about $5.78 each, so $173.40 in total, and about $14.22 each at 1080p, or $426.60. Because the estimate is reserved at submit, the wallet must hold the sum of everything you have queued, not only the running job. On the Free plan, with 1 running and 5 queued, six jobs hold $34.68 at 720p at once.

Start with a handful of 720p jobs, read the reserved row and the final captured amount for one of them, and only then scale the batch. If the captured amount differs from your derived number, trust the ledger.