Seed 2.0 Lite, the ByteDance Seed model in numbers

Seed 2.0 Lite at a glance

Seed 2.0 Lite is a language model from ByteDance Seed, released on February 14, 2026. That makes it 8 months old as of October 22, 2026. Its weights are not published, so it only runs remotely, through the ByteDance Seed API or partner hosts (12 listed on models.dev). It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money.

We file it under budget models (24 models in this category on the site).

Benchmark results

As of October 22, 2026, Epoch AI publishes no score for Seed 2.0 Lite on our basket's benchmarks. To place it, rely on its specifications and price, then test it on your own cases.

What it costs

Seed 2.0 Lite costs $0.13 per million input tokens and $0.76 per million output tokens (median of 12 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

In practice, an agent task that reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 costs about $0.004, or $4.12 for 1,000 such tasks.

That is 1.5 times cheaper than the median output price of budget models ($1.13).

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

What it can do

Its context window reaches 262,144 tokens, roughly 393 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a long report or several contracts at once. A single answer can run to 131,072 tokens.

It accepts as input: text, image and video.

It can call tools (functions, APIs) and return structured JSON output, which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

Who is it for?

Given its category, Seed 2.0 Lite is mainly aimed at high volumes where every cent counts: sorting, information extraction, summaries, simple assistants.

Its very low cost (under half a cent for our sample task) means it can be called thousands of times a day.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

What could replace it?

In the same category, the models closest to Seed 2.0 Lite are:

• Mercury 2.5 (Inception, $0.75 per million output tokens)
• Codestral 25.08 (Mistral AI, $0.90 per million output tokens)
• MiniMax-M3.1-Flash (MiniMax, $0.60 per million output tokens)
• Qwen3.6 Flash (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 64.5)