ByteDance Seed · Model
Seed 1.6 Flash pricing, context window and specs
Seed 1.6 Flash costs $0.075 per million input tokens and $0.30 per million output tokens, and reads up to 262,144 tokens per request. By blended price it is the cheapest of ByteDance Seed’s 6 current models here.
- Input / 1M
- $0.075
- Output / 1M
- $0.30
- Cached / 1M
- –
- Context
- 262,144
- Max output
- 32,768
- Released
- 2025-12-23
Estimate your cost with Seed 1.6 FlashCompare all ByteDance Seed modelsCount tokens for Seed 1.6 Flash
Pricing
Seed 1.6 Flash API pricing
| Price per 1M tokens | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | $0.075 | $0.30 |
| Prompts of 128,000+ tokens | $0.10 | $0.80 |
Output costs 4.0× the input price, so long replies drive the bill more than long prompts. No cached-input price is published, so repeated prompt prefixes are billed at the full input price. Once a single prompt reaches 128,000 tokens, the whole request is billed at the higher long-context rate shown above.
Examples
What Seed 1.6 Flash costs in practice
| Workload | Tokens in / out | Requests/day | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot | 1,500 / 400 | 1,000 | $0.000233 | $7.07 |
| RAG app | 6,000 / 500 | 500 | $0.0006 | $9.13 |
| Coding agent | 40,000 / 2,000 | 200 | $0.0036 | $21.90 |
| Document summariser | 8,000 / 600 | 300 | $0.00078 | $7.12 |
Change any number in the cost calculator.
Context
Context window
Seed 1.6 Flash accepts up to 262,144 tokens per request, roughly 196,608 English words or 393 pages. That budget is shared between your prompt and the reply, and a single reply is capped at 32,768 tokens.
Filling the whole window with one prompt costs about $0.0262 at list price, so for repeated long-document work, retrieval (sending only the relevant parts) or prompt caching is usually much cheaper.
Features
Capabilities
- Image input
- Yes
- Tool / function calling
- Yes
- Reasoning mode
- Yes
- Prompt caching
- No
- Structured output
- Yes
- Open weights
- No
- Accepts
- image, text, video
- Knowledge cutoff
- Not published
As declared by the provider’s API. It shows a feature exists, not how well it works.
API
Seed 1.6 Flash model ID
- OpenRouter
bytedance-seed/seed-1.6-flash
Use the OpenRouter ID when calling it through OpenRouter; ByteDance Seed’s own API may name it differently. See the model ID reference for the providers we document.
ByteDance Seed
Where Seed 1.6 Flash sits in ByteDance Seed’s line-up
Ranked by blended price (three parts input to one part output, $0.1312 per 1M for Seed 1.6 Flash), it is the cheapest of ByteDance Seed’s 6 current models here. One step up, Seed-2.0-Mini costs $0.175 (1.3× as much). Unlike Seed 1.6 Flash, it caps a reply at 131,072 tokens (32,768 here). See every ByteDance Seed model and price
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context | Released |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed 1.6 Flash (this page) | $0.075 | $0.30 | 262,144 | 2025-12-23 |
| Seed-2.0-Mini | $0.10 | $0.40 | 262,144 | 2026-02-26 |
| Seed 1.6 | $0.25 | $2 | 262,144 | 2025-12-23 |
| Seed-2.0-Lite | $0.25 | $2 | 262,144 | 2026-03-10 |
| Seed 2.1 Turbo | $0.50 | $2.50 | 262,144 | 2026-08-12 |
| Seed-2.0-Code | $0.50 | $3 | 262,144 | 2026-08-12 |
ByteDance Seed’s current models with a page here, cheapest first. Older and superseded models are listed on the provider page and in the comparison table.
Save
Cheaper alternatives
- Qwen3.5-9BQwen14% cheaper
Current models from major providers, one per provider, that keep image input, tool calling, a reasoning mode, a usable context window and output limit. Compared by blended price.
Compare
Similarly priced models
- Ministral 3 8B 2512Mistral$0.15 / $0.15
- Gemma 4 31BGoogle$0.09 / $0.34
- Qwen3.5-9BQwen$0.10 / $0.15
- Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3BNVIDIA$0.06 / $0.24
- GPT-6 LunaOpenAI$0.10 / $0.50
Current models from other major providers, closest blended price.
FAQ
Seed 1.6 Flash questions
How much does Seed 1.6 Flash cost?
Seed 1.6 Flash costs $0.075 per million input tokens and $0.30 per million output tokens. A typical chatbot reply (1,500 tokens in, 400 out) costs about $0.000233. Use the LLM cost calculator for your own workload.
What is Seed 1.6 Flash’s context window?
262,144 tokens, about 196,608 English words or 393 printed pages, shared between your prompt and the reply. A single reply can be up to 32,768 tokens.
Does Seed 1.6 Flash support prompt caching and batch requests?
No cached-input price is published for it. No batch price is published for it.
What are cheaper alternatives to Seed 1.6 Flash?
With the same essentials (image input and tool calling), the cheapest options are Qwen3.5-9B (14% cheaper). Cheaper doesn’t mean equivalent, so test them on your own prompts.
What is the API model ID for Seed 1.6 Flash?
On OpenRouter it is bytedance-seed/seed-1.6-flash. ByteDance Seed’s own API may use a different name, so check its model list before you deploy. Pass the ID as the model value in each request.
Is Seed 1.6 Flash open source?
No, Seed 1.6 Flash is only available through ByteDance Seed’s API and partners; its weights aren’t published.