Seedream 5.5 is ByteDance's newest image model. The company's Seed team announced it on November 9, 2026 as the successor to Seedream 5.0 Pro, with three headline ideas: edits that hold up across a long chain, images that can come with a transparent background, and more accurate small text. MagicShot lists it in two tools, Text to Image and Image Editing, and at 80 credits it is one of the cheaper ways to try a brand-new model.
What ByteDance says Seedream 5.5 does
ByteDance's announcement centres on editing. In its demo the same portrait is edited 100 times in a row, each round starting from the previous result, and ByteDance says unchanged parts of the image stay stable. If you have ever watched a picture slowly drift after a few AI edits, that is the problem this model is aimed at.
The company also describes native RGBA output, meaning an alpha channel with fully and partly transparent areas, so a logo, sticker or product cut-out does not need a separate background-removal step. On text, ByteDance reports severe corruption in 0.4% of its Chinese and English test images and minor corruption in 1.7%. It also claims better lighting, materials and skin detail, and says reference images can be used for style, character reuse and transparent assets.
These figures come from ByteDance's own evaluations. The model beat GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and Nano Banana 2.1 in those tests, but nobody outside ByteDance has verified that yet.
Where to use it on MagicShot
Text to Image creates a picture from a prompt. Seedream 5.5 appears in the model list next to GPT, Nano Banana, Recraft and others.
Image Editing is where you add a photo and say what to change. It accepts up to 4 photos: the first is edited and the others work as references.
What it costs on MagicShot
On November 11, 2026, Seedream 5.5 showed 80 credits per image in Text to Image at the default 1:1 setting. In the same list, Seedream 5 Pro showed 300, Seedream 5 Lite 95 and Seedream 4 70, while GPT Image 2.6 Flare and Sunburst each showed 650. Image Editing showed 167 credits at its default settings. Prices can change with settings, so read the number on the Generate button.
Seedream 5.5 and the other Seedream models
MagicShot also carries Seedream 5 Pro, Seedream 5 Lite and Seedream 4. At these prices, Seedream 5.5 is a low-cost way to test whether ByteDance's editing and text claims hold up on your own images. ByteDance also says a Pro version of the 5.5 series is coming, with no details yet.
What we could not confirm
ByteDance's BytePlus page still calls Seedream 5.5 a preview coming to its Lumina platform, while news coverage describes a rollout in ByteDance's Chinese apps and cloud. None of these sources state a maximum resolution, API pricing or independent benchmarks. We have not verified that MagicShot's tools export transparent files or that 100 edit rounds hold up in practice, so test a few rounds before you build a workflow on it.