Seedance 2.5 API: Endpoints, Limits & What It Costs

If you want to build Seedance 2.5 into an app or pipeline rather than click around a web UI, you want the API. It's live now — here's where it lives, what it will accept, and the parts worth knowing before you commit to a provider.

Where the API lives

Seedance 2.5 is a ByteDance model, so the first-party API runs through Volcano Engine (Ark) in China and BytePlus ModelArk internationally — the same surfaces that serve Seedance 2.0.

• Volcano Engine Ark — model doubao-seedance-2-5-260628, submitted as a video generation task against the Ark v3 endpoint. Access is gated on account standing rather than open signup.
• BytePlus ModelArk — model dreamina-seedance-2-5-260628, the international surface.
• fal — bytedance/seedance-2.5 in text-to-video, image-to-video and reference-to-video variants, billed per second.
• Replicate — bytedance/seedance-2.5, with a playground alongside the API.

Reports had pointed to the API broadening around July 16, 2026; that date passed without a public endpoint, and the real opening came later. Precise "API GA day" dates still circulating in search results come from aggregators, not ByteDance — don't build a changelog entry on them.

What the API accepts

• Durations of 4 to 30 seconds in a single call, no client-side stitching.
• Up to 50 reference inputs per request — 30 images, 10 videos and 10 audio files, with reference video capped at 30 seconds in total.
• 480p, 720p and 1080p at 24fps — but check your provider, because the tiers are not uniform. BytePlus documents all three; fal exposes only 480p and 720p, so a fal-routed integration cannot reach 1080p.
• Text-to-video, image-to-video and reference-to-video, with audio generated alongside the picture.

One trap worth knowing: the 1080p codec

BytePlus documents Seedance 2.5's 1080p output as 10-bit, and ByteDance's own Ark documentation notes that its H.265/HEVC encoding may not play in every environment, recommending a player like VLC, MPV or QuickTime.

This bites harder on 2.5 than on 2.0. Seedance 2.0's 1080p is 8-bit and only its 4K output goes 10-bit, so 2.5 introduces the awkward codec one tier lower. If your product hands generated files straight to a browser <video> element or a Linux-based pipeline, test a 1080p 2.5 output end to end before you ship it as a default.

How billing works

ByteDance has not published a first-party consumer rate card for Seedance 2.5, so what you pay depends entirely on the route:

• Ark / ModelArk bill per video token, which scales with resolution × fps × duration.
• fal and Replicate bill per second of output, with the rate stepping up by resolution.
• Sunra bills in subscription credits that scale with duration and resolution.

Whatever the route, the two cost drivers are the same: seconds and resolution. A 30-second 1080p clip is a different order of spend from a 5-second 480p test, so iterate cheap and finish expensive. Rates move, so read your provider's live rate card rather than any figure from a blog — including the ones extrapolated from Seedance 2.0 that circulated during the beta.

The no-code way to start

If you don't need the API yet — you just want to see what Seedance 2.5 produces — skip the setup:

1. Copy a proven prompt from the Seedance 2.5 prompt library.
2. Run it on Sunra and judge the output.
3. Move to the API once you know the shots you want to automate.

For the broader access picture, see how to access Seedance 2.5 and what is Seedance 2.5.