Seedream 5.0 Flash Is Live: $0.018 per Image

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Key Takeaways

• New model, live now: seedream-5-0-flash-260915, available in the default / svip groups, on the same /v1/images/generations endpoint as the other Seedream versions
• Cheapest in the series: $0.018 per request, the same as BytePlus official pricing; reference images are free and failed requests are not billed. With top-up bonuses the effective price is roughly 9%–17% below the official rate
• Fast in practice: 11–20 seconds for text-to-image and about 28 seconds for editing with 10 reference images, far quicker than 5.0 Pro’s two minutes
• Strong on layout and text: a three-line Chinese poster and an English / Japanese / Korean title all rendered correctly in our tests, and interactive editing adds elements at a precise position
• Transparent layers need layer separation: layer_decomposition returns a background base plus several transparent layers, but it is billed per output image, often a dozen or more

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Background

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Detailed Analysis

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Official Comparison: Flash vs. Pro

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APIYI Test Results

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Specifications

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Practical Use

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Recommended Scenarios

• High-volume e-commerce and ad assets: $0.018 per request in under 20 seconds, good for generating hundreds or thousands of images and picking the best
• Posters, covers and marketing images with text: layout and text rendering are this model’s strengths, in Chinese and other languages
• Editing existing assets: interactive editing changes images by position, and layer separation turns a finished image into reusable transparent elements
• Not a good fit: photorealistic portraits, fine material detail, or 3K / 4K output; use 5.0 Pro or 4.5 / 4.0 for those

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Code Example

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key="sk-your-apiyi-key",
    base_url="https://api.apiyi.com/v1"
)

resp = client.images.generate(
    model="seedream-5-0-flash-260915",
    prompt="An autumn coffee shop poster with the headline 'Autumn Limited' and the subtitle 'Chestnut Latte, second cup half price', warm orange tones, magazine-style layout",
    size="2K",
    response_format="url",
    extra_body={
        "watermark": False,   # omitting it adds an "AI generated" watermark
    },
)
print(resp.data[0].url)   # the link expires in about 24 hours, so save it right away

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Best Practices

• Pass exact pixels for a fixed aspect ratio: with preset tiers the model picks the ratio from the content, and 2K produced portraits such as 1776×2368 and 1664×2496 in our tests; for a 16:9 landscape image pass a size like 2560x1440
• Send watermark: false explicitly: Flash adds a watermark by default, so turn it off for commercial assets
• Use layer separation for transparency, not the prompt: asking for a transparent background in the prompt returns a png with no alpha channel, just a checkerboard drawn into the image
• Layers are billed per image, so run them at 1K: one layer request returned 12 images and cost $0.216; 1K took about 78 seconds, while a 2K request returned nothing after 15 minutes but was still billed $0.216, so always use 1K and set the client timeout to 300 seconds or more
• Start timeouts at 60 seconds: a single image takes under 20 seconds, but many reference images or large data URL uploads are slower (one data URL edit took about 54 seconds)

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Pricing and Availability

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Pricing

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Stack With Top-Up Promotions

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Summary