Volcengine Doubao Models on TheRouter — Seed 1.6, Seedance 2.0, Seedream 5.0

Why direct, not aggregator

Many existing routes to Doubao go through aggregators that add a markup and hide the provider's real rate-limit responses. TheRouter ships a dedicated provider-volcengine service that talks to Ark directly, preserves reasoning_content for any future thinking variants verbatim, and surfaces Ark's native rate-limit headers without translation. No middleman.

Model coverage at launch

Full 17-model list with pricing on the Doubao provider page. The legacy Doubao Lite/Pro classics and Doubao 1.5 thinking variants have been retired by ByteDance and are not part of the launch — Seed 1.6 / Seed 2.0 are the current generation.

Pricing

All Doubao models launch at 1× upstream cost (CNY → USD locked at 7.2). A few reference points:

• doubao-seed-1-6-flash — $0.021 in / $0.208 out per MTok (cheapest serious chat)
• doubao-seed-1-6 — $0.111 in / $1.111 out per MTok (flagship general chat)
• doubao-seed-2-0-pro — $0.444 in / $2.222 out per MTok (next-gen flagship)
• doubao-seedream-5-0 — $0.031/image
• doubao-seedance-2-0-fast — $3.06/video-MTok equivalent (cheaper than 2.0)

Three things to know about Doubao

1. Native Chinese. Doubao is trained with mainland-China web/news data and is genuinely best-in-class for CN prompts and CN↔EN translation. If your users write Chinese, this matters.
2. Code-spec variants are real. doubao-seed-2-0-code and doubao-seed-code are tuned specifically for code generation, refactor, and review — separate from the general chat models instead of bolted-on prompt tricks.
3. Seedance 2.0 is async. Video generation uses TheRouter's /v1/jobs async surface — submit a job, poll until completed, fetch the video URL. The launch includes both standard Seedance 2.0 and the faster Mini/Fast path for teams that need cheaper iteration.

Getting started

Plain chat — replace the model ID, that's it:

curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THE_ROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "doubao/doubao-seed-1-6-flash",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
  }'

Vision input:

curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THE_ROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "doubao/doubao-seed-1-6-vision",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": [
      {"type": "text", "text": "Describe this image"},
      {"type": "image_url", "image_url": {"url": "https://example.com/photo.jpg"}}
    ]}]
  }'

SeedDance text-to-video (async):

# 1. Submit
curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/jobs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THE_ROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "operation": "videos.create",
    "model": "doubao/doubao-seedance-2-0-fast",
    "prompt": "A panda playing guitar on a beach, sunset, cinematic"
  }'
# → {"id": "job_xxx", "status": "in_progress"}

# 2. Poll until completed
curl https://api.therouter.ai/v1/jobs/job_xxx \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THE_ROUTER_API_KEY"
# → {"id": "...", "status": "completed", "video_url": "https://..."}

Featured model detail pages

• doubao/doubao-seed-1-6
• doubao/doubao-seed-1-6-flash
• doubao/doubao-seed-1-6-vision
• doubao/doubao-seed-2-0-pro
• doubao/doubao-seed-2-0-code
• doubao/doubao-seedream-4-5
• doubao/doubao-seedream-5-0
• doubao/doubao-seedance-2-0
• doubao/doubao-seedance-2-0-fast
• All 17 Doubao models →