In late September 2026, ByteDance Seed quietly added Seedream 5.0 Flash (dola-seedream-5-0-flash-260915) to the BytePlus ModelArk cloud. It’s a faster, cheaper version of Seedream 5.0 Pro, which came out in July. ByteDance positions it for jobs where speed and cost matter most: banners at scale, product cards and design drafts.
What Seedream 5.0 Flash can do
Flash mirrors the 5.0 Pro feature set:
- Dense layouts: posters, infographics and cards with lots of elements.
- Multilingual text rendered right in the image.
- Coordinate-based edits: you mark the area with a point or a bounding box in the prompt, and the rest of the image stays untouched.
- Layer decomposition: one image becomes a base plus up to 16 transparent PNG layers, each with its own z-order, bounding box, name and description.
- Transparent backgrounds in the output.
- References: generation and editing from several input images. OpenRouter accepts up to 14 references per request.
Flash vs Pro
| Seedream 5.0 Flash | Seedream 5.0 Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Release | late September 2026 | July 8, 2026 |
| Resolution | 1K, 1.5K, 2K | up to 2K |
| Layers, coordinate edits | yes | yes |
| Prompt optimization | standard only | extended |
| ModelArk price | $0.018 per image | higher |
| Best for | speed and volume | top quality |
Flash maxes out at about 4.6 megapixels — for example, 2816×1584 at 16:9. There’s no 4K; for that, Seedream 4.5 is still the option. Flash also lacks the streaming generation available for 5.0 Lite and 4.5.
Pricing and availability
In BytePlus ModelArk, Flash costs $0.018 per output image at any resolution, and input images are free. Support was added to the official BytePlus plugin for ComfyUI on September 29, and the model reached OpenRouter on October 1.
How to try it in AI2Face
Seedream 5.0 Flash is available in the AI2Face generator alongside Seedream 4.5, 5.0 Lite and 5.0 Pro, so it’s easy to compare versions on the same prompt. Next to them are Nano Banana 2.1 and GPT Image for photo edits and text in images. The cost is shown before each generation. For ways to start with Seedream at no cost, see Seedream for free; for product ideas, see our guide to product cards.
FAQ
How is Seedream 5.0 Flash different from Pro?
Feature-wise, barely: the same layouts, text, coordinate edits and layers. Flash is faster and cheaper, and its prompt optimization is limited to standard mode.
How much does Seedream 5.0 Flash cost?
In BytePlus ModelArk it's $0.018 per output image at any resolution, and input images are free. OpenRouter lists the same price, from $0.018.
What's the maximum resolution of Seedream 5.0 Flash?
2K. There are 1K, 1.5K and 2K tiers, with a cap of about 4.6 megapixels — for example, 2816×1584 at 16:9. Flash has no 4K option.
Sources
2
- https://openrouter.ai/bytedance-seed/seedream-5-0-flash
- https://github.com/byteplus-sa/ComfyUI-BytePlus-ModelArk/pull/3
