Seedance 2.5 pricing in 2026: what is actually published, and how to budget a video

Someone asks what a Seedance video costs. The honest answer starts with a question back: costs where? The same model carries different per-second rates depending on which platform is serving it, and at least one of those platforms does not publish a rate at all.

What we could actually verify

We went looking for a first-party, published, per-second price for Seedance 2.5 in August 2026. We did not find one. What exists is resale pricing, and it is worth being precise about which is which.

Runway’s developer price list is the clearest primary source in the set. It sells credits at a stated $0.01 each and prices a Seedance model in credits per second of output, which works out to a range rather than a single number because the rate moves with resolution and mode. OpenRouter’s catalogue carries Seedance entries too, but their public models API returns no usable price for video, so the rate only renders on the model page itself.

If you see a confident single figure for Seedance 2.5 in a listicle, ask where it came from. Most of the numbers in circulation trace to other blogs rather than to a vendor page.

The comparison that does hold

Two vendors do publish clean per-second rates, and they are useful anchors for what a second of generated video costs at the frontier in 2026.

The spread matters more than any single row. A ten second shot is a dollar at one end of this chart and fifteen at the other. Multiply that across a shot list and the model choice stops being an aesthetic decision.

How to budget before you render

Per-second billing has one useful property: the bill is a multiplication you can do in advance. Three numbers decide it.

1. Total seconds of output. Not the length of the finished cut. The length of everything you render, including the takes you throw away.
2. Your keep rate. If you keep one take in three, your real cost per finished second is three times the rate. This is the number people forget, and it is usually the largest factor.
3. The rate itself. Per second, at the resolution you are actually going to ship.

A ninety second trailer at a keep rate of one in three is around 270 seconds of rendering. At $0.40 a second that is $108. At $1.50 it is $405. Same trailer, same shot list.

Cutting the number that actually moves

Since keep rate multiplies everything, it is the cheapest thing to improve. Three habits do most of the work.

• Render short. One beat per shot. A four second clip that works beats a twelve second one with a good middle.
• Start from an image you already approve. Image-to-video removes a whole category of re-rolls, because the look is decided before the render begins.
• Test the move at low resolution, then commit at the resolution you ship. The framing and timing are visible long before the detail is.

Why we publish our own prices

The reason this post needed a table of caveats is that most media platforms treat the price as something you discover after signing in. Our catalogue is readable without an account, every model carries the unit it is billed in, and a request we cannot price is refused rather than run and billed at a guess. It is a lower bar than it sounds, and it is not widely cleared.

Our catalogue is open-weight, so Seedance is not in it. If the brief names Seedance specifically, the platforms in the table above serve it, and our comparison page says so plainly.