ByteDance Seed Seed 2.1 Turbo vs StepFun Step 5 Preview
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 2.1 Turbo is 1.4× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Step 5 Preview accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 262K tokens.
- Step 5 Preview is the newer model (released 2026-10-08).
| Seed 2.1 Turbo | Step 5 Preview | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | ByteDance Seed | StepFun |
| Released | 2026-08-12 | 2026-10-08 |
| Input / 1M | $0.50 | $1.00 |
| Output / 1M | $2.50 | $2.70 |
| Cached input / 1M | — | $0.10 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $1.00 | $1.43 |
| Context | 262K | 1M |
| Max output | 236K | 64K |
| Accepts | text, image, video | text, image, video |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 3 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $2.50 | $2.70 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Seed 2.1 Turbo
$67.50 per month$2.25 per day
Step 5 Preview
$101 per month$3.35 per day
Seed 2.1 Turbo saves $33.00 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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