Doubao Seed 2.1
ByteDance's newest model family, unveiled June 2026 — agent-focused Pro and Turbo variants behind China's most-used AI chatbot, at aggressively low pricing.
Doubao Seed 2.1 specs at a glance
| Maker | ByteDance (Seed team / Volcano Engine) |
| Unveiled | June 2026 (Volcano Engine FORCE conference) |
| Variants | Doubao 2.1 Pro · Doubao 2.1 Turbo |
| Focus | Coding, long-chain agent task execution, multimodal understanding |
| API pricing (2.1 Pro) | ¥6 / ¥30 per 1M input / output tokens · cache-hit input from ¥1.2 |
| Predecessor | Seed 2.0 (14 Feb 2026) — Pro tier ~$0.47 / $2.37 per 1M tokens |
| Context window | TBD — not confirmed in English-language sources |
| Consumer app | Doubao — China's #1 AI chatbot, 155M weekly active users |
Calculate LLM API costs → This model has no confirmed USD per-token rate card, so it is not in the calculator — compare 16 published rate cards instead.
What's new in Doubao Seed 2.1
Seed 2.1 is ByteDance's answer to the agent race. Versus February's Seed 2.0, the 2.1 family upgrades coding, long-chain agent task execution and multimodal understanding, with the Pro variant aimed at enterprise productivity and Turbo at speed and cost.
The commercial backdrop matters too: 2026 is the year ByteDance started monetizing Doubao, launching paid consumer tiers (¥68–¥500/month) in June alongside the model refresh — a signal it believes the model family is now strong enough to charge for.
Benchmarks
ByteDance reports Seed 2.1 achieved leading scores on Terminal-Bench 2.1, SWE-Pro and SciCode for code generation, and currently leads OSWorld, MobileWorld and MMMU-Pro for agent and multimodal tasks. Exact score figures were not published in the English-language coverage we reviewed — treat "leading" as the vendor's claim until independent trackers post numbers.
Pricing
Doubao 2.1 Pro prices at ¥6 per 1M input tokens and ¥30 per 1M output tokens on Volcano Engine, with cache-hit input as low as ¥1.2 — well below Western frontier rates. The previous-generation Seed 2.0 Pro runs about $0.47 / $2.37 per 1M tokens, which frames the family's overall positioning: near-frontier capability at commodity prices, primarily for the China market.
Who should use Doubao Seed 2.1
- Teams building for the China market — first-class Volcano Engine integration, local compliance.
- Cost-driven agent workloads — the cache-hit pricing is among the lowest anywhere.
- Mobile / consumer AI products — the OSWorld and MobileWorld results reflect its device-agent focus.
For international deployments, DeepSeek V4 (open weights) or Qwen 3.7-Max (broader international hosting) are easier to adopt.
How Doubao Seed 2.1 compares
- DeepSeek V4 — China's open-weight flagship →
- Qwen 3.7-Max — Alibaba's proprietary rival →
- Kimi K2.6 — Moonshot's open coding model →
ByteDance Seed — official site
Frequently asked questions
What is Doubao Seed 2.1?
ByteDance's next-generation model family, unveiled at the 2026 Volcano Engine FORCE conference — Pro and Turbo variants focused on agent-capable enterprise productivity.
How much does Doubao 2.1 Pro cost?
¥6 per million input tokens and ¥30 per million output tokens, with cache-hit input from ¥1.2. Seed 2.0 Pro runs about $0.47/$2.37 per million.
How good is it on benchmarks?
ByteDance reports leading scores on Terminal-Bench 2.1, SWE-Pro and SciCode for code, and leadership on OSWorld, MobileWorld and MMMU-Pro for agent/multimodal tasks. Independent numbers are still pending.
How popular is Doubao?
The Doubao app is China's #1 AI chatbot with 155 million weekly active users; paid tiers from ¥68 to ¥500/month launched in 2026.
Is it available outside China?
API access runs through Volcano Engine, which primarily serves the China market; international availability is limited compared with OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.