Seedance 2.5 is priced 53% above 2.0 per token, and its 480p frame shrank

Seedance 2.5's API opens on August 7. ByteDance published the pricing ahead of it, and there is a detail in there that will quietly break your cost model if you carry it over from 2.0. Video is quoted per second and metered per token: tokens = (input_video_seconds + output_seconds) × width × height × fps / 1024 fps is fixed at 24. Multiply by the per-million-token rate and that is the bill. The published 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 costs 52.9% more per token without video input and 48.8% more with it. Only 480p and 720p are published for 2.5. No 1080p, no 4K, and offline inference reads "not supported yet". Look at the 4K row before you move on. It is the cheapest tier per token, 43% below 480p, and it is also the most expensive output on the board, because a 3840×2160 frame carries 19.4 times the pixels of what 480p actually renders. The rate drops 43% while the token count climbs 1940%. Comparing providers by scanning the rate column gets you the wrong answer by roughly a factor of eleven. The 480p frame changed and nobody said so This is not in any release note. It falls out of dividing ByteDance's own worked examples by their own token rates. Their published five-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) Divide price by token rate to recover the token count, then by 24/1024 to recover pixels: const tokens = pricePerVideo / ( ratePerMillion / 1 e6 ); const pixels = ( tokens / outputSeconds ) * ( 1024 / 24 ); // Seedance 2.5, 480p: 0.514 / (10.70/1e6) / 5 = 9,607 tokens/sec // 9,607 * 1024/24 = 409,899 px -> ~854 x 480 // Seedance 2.0, 480p: 0.352 / (7.00/1e6) / 5 = 10,057 tokens/sec // 10,057 * 1024/24 = 429,105 px -> ~873 x 491 720p resolves to 21,600 tokens per second on both versi