ByteDance Seed Seed 1.6 vs OpenAI GPT-5 Image Mini
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Seed 1.6 is 3.5× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- GPT-5 Image Mini accepts longer prompts: 400K vs 262K tokens.
- Seed 1.6 is the newer model (released 2025-12-23).
| Seed 1.6 | GPT-5 Image Mini | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ByteDance Seed | OpenAI |
| Released | 2025-12-23 | 2025-10-16 |
| Input / 1M | $0.25 | $2.50 |
| Output / 1M | $2.00 | $2.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | $0.25 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.688 | $2.38 |
| Context | 262K | 400K |
| Max output | 33K | 128K |
| Accepts | text, image, video | text, image, file |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $2.00 | $2.00 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | Operational |
Cost calculator
Seed 1.6
$45.00 per month$1.50 per day
GPT-5 Image Mini
$180 per month$6.00 per day
Seed 1.6 saves $135 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Seed 1.6 with
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