Seedance public-data review: the top-ranked model nobody prices

What Seedance is, and which version matters

Seedance is a family, not a product, and the version numbers move fast enough that most write-ups are describing something that has been superseded.

Seedance 2.5 is the one to price. Its documented parameters allow a duration of 4 to 30 seconds, with an option to let the model choose the length, and audio generated together with the video rather than dubbed on afterwards — with a switch to turn audio off if you want a silent clip. The reference system is the headline: a single generation accepts up to 50 assets combining images, short video clips and audio, which is what makes it a genuine editing tool rather than a prompt box.

Two claims here need care. The Artificial Analysis ranking is widely reported rather than something CartSignal has verified against the leaderboard, and leaderboard positions change. And ByteDance's own Seed site documents Seedance 1.0 in detail while listing the newer versions by name only, so the 2.5 feature list above comes from its API documentation and launch coverage rather than a single official spec sheet.

Nobody at ByteDance will tell you the price

This is the finding that should shape how you buy Seedance, and it is unusual enough to state plainly. Three official ByteDance surfaces were checked on 10 September 2026 and none produced a usable rate:

• BytePlus ModelArk, the official API platform, renders its pricing documentation client-side. The pricing and model-list pages returned navigation scaffolding with no rate table in the source.
• Dreamina, ByteDance's own consumer app for Seedance, shows a pricing page that describes free daily credits and carries no plan or credit table.
• Dreamina's dedicated "Seedance 2.5 pricing" page does quote a figure — and then disclaims it. The page states: "Prices above are campaign planning figures supplied for this draft on August 10, 2026," followed by "Verify checkout terms before publishing or purchasing." Elsewhere it refers to itself as "this draft".

A page that identifies its own numbers as campaign planning figures for a draft is not a rate card, so this review does not publish the $0.097-per-second figure it contains. That is a shame, because it is the only ByteDance-side number available. Treat it as marketing copy until it appears on a checkout page.

The plan names do not agree with each other either. Dreamina's Seedance 2.0 pricing page names Standard, Pro and Max tiers; its Seedance 2.5 page compares against an "Advanced" plan; product-interface records from earlier in 2026 describe Free, Basic, Standard and Advanced. This review therefore publishes no Dreamina plan prices at all. It is the same failure mode documented on Fliki and VEED, where dollar amounts render client-side and third-party trackers disagree by multiples — except here it affects the highest-ranked video model on the market.

The one published rate card: Runway

The exception is a reseller. Runway's developer pricing documentation publishes exact per-second credit rates for four Seedance variants, and states that credits are purchasable at $0.01 per credit. That makes it the only place a buyer can compute a Seedance bill in advance from an official page.

The newer flagship is the cheaper one

Read the table in price order and something unusual falls out. Seedance 2.5 undercuts Seedance 2 at both of the resolutions they share. At 720p it is 30 credits per second against 36 — about 17% cheaper. At 480p it is 20 against 36 — about 44% cheaper. The newer model is also the more capable one, generating up to 30 seconds with native audio. On this card there is no reason to run Seedance 2 at 480p or 720p at all.

That runs against the pattern this site keeps finding elsewhere, where the newer or higher thing costs more per unit — HeyGen's Avatar V at 48 credits a minute against Avatar III's 4, or Synthesia's Creator tier costing about 17% more per credit than Starter.

The ordering flips at 1080p, though. There Seedance 2 costs 40 credits per second and Seedance 2.5 costs 68, so the older model is 41% cheaper for the same resolution. The reason is that the 720p-to-1080p step is priced completely differently between two models in the same family: 2.27x on Seedance 2.5 (30 to 68) against 1.11x on Seedance 2 (36 to 40). Resolution is not a fixed markup, and on Seedance it is not even a consistent one within one vendor's own family.

The reference surcharge is charged on the input, not the output

Seedance 2.5's selling point is reference-driven generation. Runway prices it at exactly 50% of the output rate at every resolution — 10, 15 and 34 credits per second against output rates of 20, 30 and 68. That consistency is welcome, but the unit is the trap: the surcharge is charged per second of input and reference video, not per second of finished video.

So the cost of a reference clip scales with how long the reference is, and it can exceed the cost of what you generate. Feeding a 20-second reference to produce a 5-second 720p clip costs 150 credits of output plus 300 credits of input — the reference is twice the price of the video. Trim references to the shortest usable segment before uploading; on a per-second meter that is a real saving rather than housekeeping. This is the mirror of the media-hour trap on Descript, which also bills footage going in rather than video coming out.

One 30-second clip can exceed a whole month

Seedance 2.5's headline capability collides with plan sizing. Runway's published allowances are 625 credits a month on Standard, 2,250 on Pro and 9,500 on Max. Against the 2.5 rates above, a single maximum-length clip costs:

A Standard subscriber cannot generate one 30-second 720p clip in a month. At 480p they can generate exactly one, with 25 credits left over. Max's 9,500 credits are about ten 30-second 720p clips, or four at 1080p. If the 30-second single-pass generation is why you want Seedance, size the plan against that clip and not against a per-second rate that looks small.

One reassuring detail, against the run of this site's findings: the 80-credit minimum on Seedance 2.5 works out at exactly 4 seconds of 480p output, which matches the model's own documented 4-second minimum duration. At 720p and 1080p it covers 2.7 and 1.2 seconds, both below that floor. So unlike the 8-second stock-avatar minimum on Fliki, this minimum is calibrated to the model rather than rounding short clips upward — it should never bite on output-only generation.

The 1080p and 4K question

Worth raising before anyone buys the top tier. Seedance 2.5's live API is reported to expose only 480p and 720p output tiers, and the published rate card on Fliki, which also resells the family, lists Seedance 2.0 and Seedance 2.0 Mini at 720p only — with no 1080p row, even though Fliki does list 1080p rows for other models. Runway nevertheless sells Seedance 2 at 1080p and 4K, and Seedance 2.5 at 1080p.

Whether those higher tiers are native model output or provider-side upscaling was not established from any official page, so this review records it as an unresolved question rather than a finding. It matters commercially: Seedance 2 at 4K is 150 credits per second, five times the Seedance 2.5 720p rate and $45.00 for a 30-second clip against $9.00. If you are paying a 5x premium for resolution, ask the vendor whether the model generated those pixels or an upscaler did.

If you are migrating off Sora

Timing makes this urgent. OpenAI's deprecations page lists the Videos API and the sora-2 model aliases for removal on 24 September 2026 — two weeks from this review — with no named replacement model. Our Sora alternatives guide covers the migration in full, and Seedance belongs on that shortlist for prompt-to-clip work with native audio, alongside Google Veo 3.1 and Kling.

The practical argument for Seedance is duration and references: 30 seconds in one pass is longer than the usual 5-to-10-second clip, and the reference system handles continuity that would otherwise need stitching. The practical argument against it is everything above — you are buying a model whose vendor publishes no price, through a reseller, at a rate that reseller can change. If a stable published rate matters more than capability, Veo on the Gemini API remains the option with official per-second list pricing direct from the vendor.

Best-fit use cases

• Prompt-to-clip work needing a single take longer than the usual 5-to-10 seconds, up to 30 seconds with synchronised audio
• Reference-driven continuity, where up to 50 images, clips and audio assets guide one generation
• Cheap draft and previsualisation passes: Seedance 2 Mini at 16 credits per second is the cheapest Seedance variant on Runway's card, though Runway's own Gen-4 Turbo at 5 is cheaper still
• Teams already on a Runway seat, where Seedance draws on credits they already hold rather than a new subscription

Limitations to verify

• No official ByteDance page published a readable Seedance price during this review
• Dreamina's Seedance 2.5 pricing page describes its own figures as campaign planning figures for a draft; its per-second number is not published here
• Dreamina plan names differ across ByteDance's own surfaces, so no plan pricing is published here
• Whether 1080p and 4K tiers are native output or upscales is unresolved
• The reference surcharge bills per second of input, so long references can cost more than the output
• Reseller rates are set by the reseller and can change independently of ByteDance
• The Artificial Analysis ranking is widely reported rather than verified here, and leaderboard positions move
• Commercial-use rights and any provider-side content marking were not established from an official page — relevant under Article 50 labeling duties

How it fits against other tools here

Seedance is the first model on this shelf whose price has to be quoted from someone other than its maker. Google Veo publishes official per-second Gemini API rates, Kling publishes an official credit table, and Runway publishes rates that match exactly between its app and its API. Seedance publishes nothing a machine can read — which, for the model most often described as the field's strongest, is the single most useful thing a buyer can know about it.

Against Runway's own Gen-4.5 at 12 credits per second, Seedance 2.5 at 720p costs 2.5x as much per second on the same card, so it is a deliberate choice rather than a default. Against Veo 3.1, the comparison is duration and references against published, vendor-direct pricing. The wider lists are best AI video tools and the AI video category, and if the actual job is a talking head rather than a generated scene, HeyGen vs Synthesia is the better starting point.

FAQ

How much does Seedance cost?

No official ByteDance page published a readable price during this review. BytePlus ModelArk's pricing docs rendered as navigation only, Dreamina's pricing page showed free daily credits and no plan table, and Dreamina's Seedance 2.5 pricing page calls its own figures campaign planning figures supplied for a draft. The exact published rates come from resellers: Runway lists Seedance 2.5 at 20, 30 and 68 credits per second for 480p, 720p and 1080p, and sells credits at $0.01, which is $0.20, $0.30 and $0.68 per generated second.

Is Seedance 2.5 more expensive than Seedance 2?

At 480p and 720p it is cheaper, which is unusual for a newer flagship — 20 and 30 credits per second against a flat 36 for Seedance 2, so about 44% and 17% less, while also generating longer clips with native audio. The ordering flips at 1080p, where Seedance 2 is 40 against 68.

What does the reference video surcharge cost?

Exactly 50% of the output rate at every resolution: 10, 15 and 34 credits per second against 20, 30 and 68. It is billed per second of input and reference video rather than per second of output, so a long reference can cost more than the clip. A 20-second reference feeding a 5-second 720p generation costs 300 credits of input against 150 of output.

Can Seedance really generate 30-second videos?

Seedance 2.5 is documented at 4 to 30 seconds in a single pass with audio generated alongside the picture. Budget for it first: at 30 credits per second, one 30-second 720p clip is 900 credits, more than Runway's entire 625-credit Standard month. At 1080p it is 2,040 credits, about 91% of a full Pro month.

Does Seedance output 1080p or 4K natively?

Unresolved from public data. The 2.5 API is reported to expose only 480p and 720p, and Fliki lists Seedance 2.0 and 2.0 Mini at 720p only, yet Runway sells 1080p and 4K tiers. Whether those are native output or upscales was not established from an official page. At 150 credits per second for 4K — five times the 2.5 720p rate — it is worth asking before paying.

Has CartSignal tested Seedance?

No. This is a public-data review built from Runway's official developer pricing documentation, ByteDance's Seed and Dreamina pages, BytePlus ModelArk documentation and reseller model documentation, checked September 2026. No hands-on render quality, motion, prompt adherence or latency testing is claimed.

Source links

• Runway official developer pricing (per-second Seedance credit rates, reference surcharges, minimums, $0.01 credit price)
• ByteDance Seed official Seedance page (model family, Seedance 1.0 capabilities)
• BytePlus ModelArk pricing documentation (returned no readable rate table, September 2026)
• Dreamina official pricing page (free daily credits, no plan table)
• Dreamina Seedance 2.5 pricing page (carries the campaign-planning-figures draft note)
• Seedance 2.5 model documentation (4 to 30 second duration, native audio, audio toggle)