Everything about Seed 2.0 Mini

What you need to know

ByteDance Seed released Seed 2.0 Mini on February 14, 2026. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money. It is a closed model: you access it through an API, from ByteDance Seed or one of the 14 providers listed on models.dev. That makes it 8 months old as of October 22, 2026.

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

Measured performance

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

What it can do

Its context window reaches 256,000 tokens, roughly 384 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a long report or several contracts at once. A single answer can run to 32,000 tokens.

It accepts as input: text and image.

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

What it costs

Seed 2.0 Mini costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens (median of 14 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

To put it in perspective: reading 20,000 tokens (about thirty pages) and writing 2,000 costs roughly $0.003; a thousand of those tasks, $2.8.

That is 2.8 times cheaper than the median output price of budget models ($1.13).

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

Who is it for?

Given its category, Seed 2.0 Mini 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.

Alternatives

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

• Qwen3.5 Flash (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 62.6)
• Solar Mini 4 (Upstage, $0.40 per million output tokens)
• Mercury 3 (Inception, $0.35 per million output tokens)
• GPT-6 Luna (OpenAI, index 80.3)