Seedream is the flagship image generation model family from ByteDance's Seed AI research team. The series spans Seedream 3.0 and 4.0 through the current Seedream 4.5 and Seedream 5.0 Lite, with official model pages hosted on the ByteDance Seed site.
Seedream 4.0 unified image generation and image editing in a single Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture with distillation acceleration, delivering roughly 10x faster inference than version 3.0 and output up to 4K resolution. Seedream 4.5 scales the model further with accurate subject identification in multi-image editing, strict preservation of reference-image details such as faces, lighting, and color tones, and improved dense text rendering with designer-level composition and typography for posters, branding, and advertising work. Seedream 5.0 Lite adds deep-thinking reasoning and online search to a unified multimodal generation model.
The models are proprietary with no open weights. Consumer access is available through ByteDance apps such as Doubao and Dreamina, while developers can use the first-party API via BytePlus and Volcano Engine ModelArk, priced per image at roughly $0.035 to $0.04 per generation, with free test images for evaluation. Seedream models are also hosted by third-party providers including fal, Replicate, and OpenRouter.