Seedance 2.5 API pricing: verified rates and availability compared

Seedance 2.5 now has public, model-specific API rates at several providers, so a 480p or 720p second can finally be compared instead of estimated. This comparison uses provider-owned pricing pages only, and separates the per-second rate from the billing rules that change the final bill.

Seedance 2.5 API price comparison at 480p, 720p and 1080p

Every row below comes from a provider-owned pricing page that identifies Seedance 2.5 and states a per-second billing unit. The table lists the providers we verified that charge more than Cheap.dev for the same output configuration; it is a price check against higher-priced routes, not a census of every reseller in the market.

Rates are for text or image input billed on output duration. Cheap.dev amounts link to our live pricing page and were checked on August 22, 2026; every other amount links to the provider page it was read from on August 19, 2026. fal.ai bills per token, so its per-second figures are the provider’s own 16:9 approximation. Prices exclude taxes and negotiated discounts. A consumer plan is not treated as an API rate unless the provider also documents the model’s billable unit.

How much more the same clip costs elsewhere

At 720p, a five-second Seedance 2.5 clip costs $1.50 on Cheap.dev. The same clip is about 17% more at PiAPI, 20% more at WaveSpeedAI, 54% more at EmpirioLabs and 58% more at fal.ai. The 480p spread is narrower but points the same way, from about 15% more at PiAPI to roughly 70% more at fal.ai.

Resolution is the expensive decision at every provider: moving from 480p to 720p is roughly a 2.3× step on Cheap.dev and closer to 2.25× on most other catalogs, so drafting at 480p and finishing at 720p is the single largest lever on a Seedance 2.5 bill.

How Cheap.dev Seedance 2.5 pricing works

Cheap.dev’s live catalog charges $0.13 per output second at 480p, $0.30 per output second at 720p and $0.72 per output second at 1080p when the request starts from text or images. Catalog credits convert at 100 credits per US dollar, so these are 13, 30 and 72 credits per output second.

1080p is also worth checking against availability rather than price alone: PiAPI states that Seedance 2.5 does not support 1080p on its route, and fal.ai publishes 480p and 720p rates only.

Reference-video requests use a different billing rule

When a Seedance 2.5 request includes video, Cheap.dev charges $0.10 per billable second at 480p, $0.26 at 720p or $0.60 at 1080p. Billable input duration is the greater of the actual input duration and ceil(2/3 × output duration), then the output duration is added. A five-second reference plus a five-second result therefore has ten billable seconds; a two-second reference plus a five-second result is billed as four input seconds plus five output seconds, or nine seconds total.

Reference-video billing is the one place where per-second rates are not comparable across providers at all. Some catalogs bill only the generated seconds, some bill input plus output at a discounted rate, and PiAPI charges reference duration at half its output rate. Before comparing any two reference-video quotes, confirm which seconds each provider counts.

What still makes Seedance 2.5 quotes hard to compare

Seedance 2.0 prices are not Seedance 2.5 prices

A provider’s 2.0 Standard, Mini, or Fast rate cannot be relabeled as a 2.5 rate. The models and commercial routes are distinct, even when the request schema looks similar.

Token pricing is not the same as per-second pricing

fal.ai bills $0.0214 per 1,000 tokens, where tokens scale with output height, width, duration and frame rate. The per-second figures above are the 16:9 case; a wider aspect ratio has a larger frame area and costs more per second at the same resolution label.

Per-run base prices hide the real unit

WaveSpeedAI advertises Seedance 2.5 text-to-video “from $0.9 per run”, which is a five-second 480p job rather than a rate. Convert every headline to a per-second unit at a fixed resolution before comparing.

Subscriptions can hide the generation denominator

A plan can advertise a large allowance without documenting the price of a 480p or 720p second. Without a billable unit, cost per clip cannot be reproduced.

Which Seedance 2.5 API should you choose?

• Optimising for cost per finished second: Cheap.dev is cheaper than every provider in the table above at 480p, 720p and 1080p, on a published catalog rate rather than a quote.
• Already on fal.ai: compute the token estimate for your exact aspect ratio rather than assuming the 16:9 per-second figure, because fal.ai is the most expensive verified route here.
• Need 1080p: check availability first — several routes cap Seedance 2.5 at 720p, and the ones that do offer 1080p charge $0.90 to $1.137 per second against Cheap.dev’s $0.72.
• Using video references: model input plus output duration together, because the displayed per-second rate is not the whole job cost.

Methodology and sources

We checked Cheap.dev’s live catalog on August 22, 2026, re-checked external provider-owned pricing and model pages on August 19, 2026, and kept only providers that publish a model-specific Seedance 2.5 rate with a stated billing unit. Five-second estimates multiply the applicable output-second rate by five; reference-video examples include five input and five output seconds. Kie.ai and Seeddance.io blocked our fetch on this pass, and the per-million-token rates attributed to BytePlus ModelArk could not be confirmed on a BytePlus-owned page, so no rate is claimed from any of the three.

• Cheap.dev live pricing
• PiAPI Seedance 2.5 pricing
• WaveSpeedAI Seedance 2.5 text-to-video
• EmpirioLabs Seedance 2.5 pricing
• fal.ai Seedance 2.5 text-to-video pricing
• BytePlus ModelArk product page