Seedream 5.0
ByteDance Seed's reasoning image family: Pro, Lite and Flash tiers with precision editing and multilingual typography.
About
Seedream 5.0 is ByteDance Seed's multimodal image-generation family, launched September 15, 2026 as the successor to Seedream 4.x. It ships in three tiers: 5.0 Lite for deep-thinking, online-search-assisted exploration; 5.0 Pro for advanced reasoning, spatially-guided precision editing, layer decomposition and multilingual design; and 5.0 Flash, a faster cheaper variant BytePlus says matches Pro's capabilities. The headline strengths are dense information design — infographics, posters, packaging with accurate multilingual typography in 10+ languages — and production control: region-select editing, subject-consistent multi-reference generation (up to 10-14 reference images), and 1K/1.5K/2K output.
Access runs through BytePlus ModelArk outside China and Volcengine inside it, plus OpenRouter, fal, Runware and WaveSpeed, with ComfyUI and InvokeAI integrations. BytePlus's pricing page (read October 2026) lists Flash at $0.018 per image, Lite at $0.035, and Pro at $0.045 (1.5K and below) or $0.09 above that. ByteDance publishes no benchmark comparisons, so quality claims rest on the release materials and hands-on coverage rather than evals.
Specs
Context window
Pricing
Free quota
API access
Weights
Released
Benchmarks
No published benchmarks found
Provider-reported unless a source says otherwise. Benchmarks are marketing-adjacent by nature — treat them as directional.
Use cases
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: ByteDance Seed family launch Sep 15, 2026 (press release) with three documented tiers; BytePlus pricing page read Oct 2026 ($0.018–$0.09/image); third-party integrations confirmed via BytePlus's ComfyUI docs and InvokeAI docs. Closed weights. Release facts corroborated across BytePlus docs, InvokeAI docs, and the launch PR. Strengths: clear tiering, published pricing, broad third-party serving ecosystem. Docked for: (1) zero published benchmarks — all quality claims are vendor materials; (2) launch PRs ran through low-quality syndication outlets rather than ByteDance's own channels, weakening provenance.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 7.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 2.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · ByteDance Seed launch 2026-09-15; Pro/Lite/Flash tiers; BytePlus pricing $0.018–$0.09/image (Oct 2026); ComfyUI/InvokeAI integrations
- · Docked: Zero published benchmarks — quality claims are vendor materials
- · Docked: Launch PRs via low-quality syndication outlets, weakening provenance