Seedance 2.0 video generator

Seedance 2.0 or 2.5?

They are not an old-and-new pair, and 2.5 is not simply the better one. Moving from 2.0 to 2.5 you give up resolution and pay more per second; what you get back is length and reference capacity.

2.0 runs 4 to 15 seconds and goes up to 4K, taking up to 9 reference images. 2.5 caps at 720p but holds a single take for 30 seconds and accepts up to 30 references. Per second it costs about 53% more, and its cheapest possible render is 91% more than the cheapest on 2.0.

So the split is clean. Shooting something short that has to look sharp — a product hero, a title card, anything a client sees at full size — stay on 2.0 and spend the difference on 4K. Shooting something long that has to stay consistent, like a character who must survive half a minute without morphing, is what 2.5 is for, and 720p is the price of admission.

One practical difference: 2.0 is open to any signed-in account, while 2.5 needs an active subscription.

What a clip actually costs

Credits track pixels, not minutes. That is why five seconds has no single price: at 16:9 it is about 68 credits at 480p, 152 at 720p, 341 at 1080p and 778 at 4K. A square framing moves fewer pixels, so the same five seconds at 480p comes to about 38.

Spelling this out matters because both per-second rates and monthly tiers hide it. A headline subscription price tells you what leaves your account each month; it does not tell you how many finished shots that buys — which is the only number you actually need when you are deciding whether a re-render is worth it.

Reference to video runs on a cheaper tier — about 20% less for the same seconds and size — which is why the table above starts lower than the figures here.

Here the cost of the exact render you configured is on screen before you submit it, and a job that fails refunds its credits automatically.

Running it on your own GPU

Short answer: not this model. Seedance 2.0 is a hosted API — ByteDance has not published weights for it, so there is no checkpoint to download and no local graph that runs it. Every site offering Seedance, this one included, is calling the same upstream.

Worth saying plainly, because the open-weights video models people are running at home right now are a different family. MiniMax H3 did publish its weights, which is why you see people fitting it onto consumer cards and swapping quantisation notes. If running locally is the whole point — no per-render cost, nothing leaving your machine — that is the model to look at, not this one.

What you pay for here is the annoying part rather than the hard part: no API keys, no GPU, and no ten-minute wait on a card you also need for everything else.

Why a wide frame costs more

Seedance bills by pixel, not by second, and most people meet that fact through a surprise on the invoice.

The rate is charged per thousand tokens, where tokens track width times height times frame rate. So five seconds at 720p is 86 credits at 1:1, 152 at 16:9, and 199 at 21:9 — the same duration and the same resolution label, 2.3 times apart, because a cinemascope frame simply holds more pixels.

MiniMax H3 works the other way round: a flat per-second rate that ignores the frame entirely. Neither is better; they just reward opposite habits.