Cost-efficient ByteDance Seed 2.0 model for production chat, analysis, and structured generation
Seed 2.0 Lite by bytedance-seed is offered by 8 providers on this page. Public prices are shown for 7 of them. Its reference price is $0.31 per 1M input tokens and $2.50 per 1M output tokens. The lowest paid channel is Volcengine Ark at $0.089 / $0.534 per 1M, about 3.5× below the reference price. It also has 1 covered by a paid subscription; free tiers usually carry rate limits, and subscription-covered access bills $0 per token only after the subscription fee.
The context window is 256,000 tokens at the reference host, but hosts report different limits, from 131,072 to 262,144, so the usable window depends on the provider you pick. It supports reasoning, tool use, and structured output. Accepted input modalities are Text, Image, and Video. Providers report the capability flags inconsistently, so verify a specific feature against the host you plan to use.
| Provider | Tier | Input | Output | Cache read | Cache write | Context | Output limit | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volcengine Ark Coding Plan doubao-seed-2.0-lite | Gateway | Subscription | $0 | — | 256,000 | 32,000 | ||
| Volcengine Ark doubao-seed-2-0-lite-260428 | Cloud | $0.089 tiered >32K: $0.13 · >128K: $0.27 | $0.53 | $0.018 | — | 256,000 | 131,072 | |
| Ofox volcengine/doubao-seed-2.0-lite | Gateway | $0.13 | $0.76 | $0.03 | $0.0024 | 256,000 | 32,000 | |
| Kilo Gateway | Gateway | $0.25 | $2.00 | — | — | 262,144 ⚠ | 131,072 | |
| OpenRouter | Gateway | $0.25 tiered >128K: $0.50 | $2.00 | — | — | 262,144 ⚠ | 131,072 | |
| Merge Gateway bytedance/dola-seed-2.0-lite | Gateway | $0.25 | $2.00 | — | — | 131,072 ⚠ | 32,768 | |
| NanoGPT | Gateway | $0.25 | $2.00 | $0.13 | — | 262,144 ⚠ | 131,072 | |
| EmpirioLabs AI seed-2-0-lite | Gateway | $0.31 tiered >128K: $0.62 | $2.50 | $0.31 | — | 256,000 | 128,000 |
Sorted by blended price (input×0.75 + output×0.25) asc. The official channel always shows regardless of rank. Whether a gateway's low price is actually usable can't be verified.
Interleaved thinking (reasoning between tool calls) is declared by 2 of 8 providers.
1 more channels offer $0 (Volcengine Ark Coding Plan); free tiers usually have rate limits and no SLA, excluded from ranking.