Seed 1.6
by Bytedance Seed · bytedance-seed/seed-1.6 · #149 cheapest of 325 paid models
Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 1:32 AM UTC · refreshed hourly
Seed 1.6 is a general-purpose model released by the ByteDance Seed team. It incorporates multimodal capabilities and adaptive deep thinking with a 256K context window.
Compare vs:Claude Sonnet 5Claude Opus 4.6Claude Haiku 4.5GPT-5.6 Sol
Pricing
Input
$0.25
per 1M tokens
Output
$2.00
per 1M tokens
Blended (3:1)
$0.688
3 input : 1 output
Cache read
—
per 1M cached tokens
Cache write
—
per 1M tokens
Cache & batch economics
Effective prices for Seed 1.6 (no cache-read rate published — hits billed as normal input).
| Cache hit rate | Effective blended $/1M | Example request* | vs no cache |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | $0.688 | $0.0275 | — |
| 50% | $0.688 | $0.0275 | −0% |
| 90% | $0.688 | $0.0275 | −0% |
*Example: 100K sticky context + 2K new input + 1K output. Batch discount is an approximate 50% off list rates (available for OpenAI / Anthropic / Google — not flagged for this creator). Confirm on the vendor’s pricing page.
What a request costs
| Workload | Input tokens | Output tokens | Cost / request | Cost / 1K requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short chat message | 500 | 300 | $0.000725 | $0.725 |
| Document summary | 8,000 | 1,000 | $0.004 | $4.00 |
| Codebase question (RAG) | 30,000 | 2,000 | $0.0115 | $11.50 |
| Long-context analysis | 150,000 | 5,000 | $0.0475 | $47.50 |
Specs
Context window
262K
tokens
Max output
33K
tokens
Input modalities
image, text, video
Tokenizer
Other