ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 API Pricing
ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 costs $0.250 per 1M input tokens and $2.00 per 1M output tokens. Context window: 262K. Prices verified 2026-10-21 · source
Alternatives to consider
Cheapest bytedance-seed model — 81% less per month
Rebuilt daily from our snapshot archive — the chart appears once a model has 5+ snapshots of history.
From our own daily snapshot archive — independent of provider announcements.
Higher effort = deeper thinking = more reasoning tokens billed as output.
What would ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 cost you per month?
| Workload | Requests/mo | Avg tokens (in/out) | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light chatbot | 10,000 | 800 / 400 | $10.00 |
| Coding agent | 5,000 | 8,000 / 2,000 | $30.00 |
| RAG pipeline | 30,000 | 4,000 / 500 | $60.00 |
| Doc summarizer | 2,000 | 20,000 / 1,000 | $14.00 |
Estimates use list prices without prompt caching. Caching can cut input cost by up to 90% on repeated context.
About ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6
Seed 1.6 is a general-purpose model released by the ByteDance Seed team. It incorporates multimodal capabilities and adaptive deep thinking with a 256K context window.
Compare ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 with
- Seed 1.6 vs OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Terra Pro
- Seed 1.6 vs Anthropic: Claude Fable 5
- Seed 1.6 vs Anthropic: Claude Opus 5
- Seed 1.6 vs OpenAI: GPT-5.6 Sol
Popular head-to-heads — see all on the comparisons index.
Frequently asked questions
How much does ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 cost?
ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 costs $0.250 per 1M input tokens and $2.00 per 1M output tokens. Verified 2026-10-21 — provider source.
What is the context window?
262K tokens, with up to 33K output tokens per response. That's roughly 328 pages of text in a single request.
Does it support prompt caching?
Prompt-caching pricing is not published for this model via OpenRouter.
What's a cheaper alternative?
ScaleDown: Summarize saves about 96% on a typical workload with comparable quality.
Official resources
- ByteDance Seed: Seed 1.6 on OpenRouter — live endpoint, pricing source of record.
- Artificial Analysis leaderboard → — independent intelligence and performance rankings.
- Shred your current bill — paste a CSV and see if switching saves money.