Seedream 5 Pro
ByteDance Seedream 5 Pro: controlled generation, precise editing, realistic portraits and multilingual text.
First request
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://api.altrouter.ai/v1",
api_key="ar-...",
)
img = client.images.generate(
model="seedream-5-pro",
prompt="a red fox in the snow",
)
print(img.data[0].url)import OpenAI from "openai";
const client = new OpenAI({
baseURL: "https://api.altrouter.ai/v1",
apiKey: process.env.ALTROUTER_API_KEY, // ar-...
});
const img = await client.images.generate({
model: "seedream-5-pro",
prompt: "a red fox in the snow",
});
console.log(img.data[0].url);curl https://api.altrouter.ai/v1/images/generations \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ar-..." \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "seedream-5-pro",
"prompt": "a red fox in the snow"
}'The interface is OpenAI-compatible: in existing code only the base_url, the key and the model id change — nothing else.
Seedream 5 Pro against its price neighbours
| Model | Price | Unit | Discount | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FLUX.1 Kontext ProBlack Forest | $0.041 | image | — | Open |
| GPT Image 2.5OpenAI | $0.042 | image | — | Open |
| Seedream 5 Prothis pageByteDance | $0.045 | image | −1% | |
| Ideogram V3Ideogram | $0.051 | image | −15% | Open |
| Imagen 4 UltraGoogle | $0.069 | image | — | Open |
Prices and parameters come from the same catalog as the price above; this is not a benchmark, it is comparable billing terms.
Limits
Pricing is flat — $0.045 per image, regardless of prompt length. Allowed aspect_ratio values: 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16, 2:3, 3:2, 21:9.
There is no subscription: every successful request is billed at the price above, and a failed one is not billed at all. That price is already 1% below the vendor's official one — the official price is shown struck through next to it so it can be checked. No ByteDance account of your own is needed: requests go to api.altrouter.ai and we make the upstream call.
Rate limiting is shared across models and counted per key: 600 requests per minute by default, and a 429 with retry-after: 60 above it. An individual key can get its own limit and a spending cap per day, week, month or lifetime in the dashboard.
When to pick Seedream 5 Pro, and when a neighbour
The cheaper neighbour is GPT Image 2.5: $0.042 per image against $0.045 for Seedream 5 Pro. On the same volume the bill comes out 1.1× smaller. It is the sensible pick where the task is repetitive and high-volume — labelling, classification, short templated answers — the kind of work where quality is bounded by the prompt rather than the model.
The dearer neighbour is Ideogram V3: $0.051 per image, or 1.1× the price. On catalog parameters it offers the same capabilities and the same order of context, so the premium is only justified if Seedream 5 Pro falls short on your own task.
Guessing is more expensive than checking: the table above is prices and parameters, not a benchmark, and it cannot tell you which model does better on your own prompt. Switching costs one line — the model id in the request changes, the base_url and the key stay — so running both on your own data takes minutes.
OpenAI-compatible image generation endpoint. The result is re-hosted on our CDN and returned as a URL.
/v1/images/generations