Four video apps switched on ByteDance's 4K model and none named a price
ByteDance's flagship video model reached its first consumer shelves on November 11, and the same day an API reseller cut its price below the model owner's own list. Who keeps the margin on a second of AI video is the open question, and the publicly traded read is Adobe.
Richard Tangthree-minute read
Four creative apps switched on Seedance 2.5 4K, ByteDance's flagship video model, within about 90 minutes of each other on November 11: Magnific first, then Picsart, Pika and Krea~$290M — Krea, private, latest valuation ~$290M 1. BytePlus, ByteDance's enterprise cloud arm, had kept the 4K edition locked to business customers since October 27, and none of the four named what a 4K second costs 1. That silence is the money story: when the same model sits on every shelf, the store sells access and the model's owner keeps the pricing power.
Native 4K removes a step from the pipeline
The 4K edition writes frames directly in 10-bit color, so the upscale stage that used to guess at detail between pixels drops out of the workflow 1. A 480p draft mode lets a creator iterate cheaply and pay for the expensive render only on the take worth keeping 1. ByteDance itself pitches the 2.5 line at professional production, green-screen editing and camera blocking included, which is the difference between storyboarding footage and finishing it 2. Krea's claim of "the highest quality to date" still has no independent benchmark behind it 1.
Resellers rent the model below its maker's own list
The squeeze is already visible at lower resolutions. The same day as the rollout, Protoface, an inference platform that rents other companies' models through an API, set Seedance 2.5 at $0.18 a second at 720p 3. BytePlus's own list for that resolution is about $0.23 3. The public API still stops the model at 1080p, so 4K reaches creators only through shelves that have not named a price 1. Krea's published plans still quote the model in a 720p sample 4.
Luma~$1.1B — Luma, private, latest valuation ~$1.1B, the AI video startup that resells the older Seedance 2.0, halved those rates on November 7, as we wrote yesterday, and did not make the launch list 56. Its own Ray3.2 is now the priciest model on its own rate card 5.
Resellers rent Seedance 2.5 below its owner's own 720p list
Protoface rents the same model below BytePlus's own list price
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Protoface | $0.18/s |
| BytePlus | $0.23/s |
| Atlas Cloud | $0.3/s |
| WaveSpeed | $0.36/s |
| Fal | $0.47/s |
Adobe shelves the same model and keeps the credit
Adobe+1.13% — Adobe, up 1.13 percent today, the publicly traded creative-software company, plays the other side of the shelf. Firefly, Adobe's AI creative studio, lists Dreamina Seedance 2.5, Dreamina being ByteDance's own creative app, among its partner models 71. At its MAX conference on November 10 Adobe's agent learned to pick the model for each job, and credit revenue flows through Adobe whichever one runs 75. ByteDance is private, so that pricing power is not directly investable; the publicly traded exposure to these seconds is Adobe.
The first published 4K price names the margin
The first storefront to publish a 4K rate will name the resale margin every shelf is hiding 8. Until then, the owner sets the price and the shelves carry it, and the buyer cannot see the split. The capability is not waiting on that number: a 480p second costs eight cents through an API, so learn the model while the experiments are cheap 8.
Get Model by email, free
The AI labs, their models, and the business behind them. In our daily email, every weekday.
