MODELS
豆包 Doubao Pro
ByteDance's flagship LLM — China's price-war torchbearer.
Specs
- Context window
- 128,000
- Max output
- 8,192
- Modalities
- text, image
- Tool use
- ✓
- Vision
- ✓
- Streaming
- ✓
- License
- proprietary
- Released
- 2024-05-15
Pricing
- Input / 1M
- $0.50
- Output / 1M
- $1.50
Cost estimate
Doubao Pro (May 2024) is ByteDance's flagship LLM, served via Volcano Engine. Famous for triggering the 2024 China LLM price war — at ¥0.0008/1K input it was a ~99.3% cut from then-prevailing prices. Strong on Mandarin tasks, integrates tightly with ByteDance's ecosystem (Douyin/TikTok content moderation, Lark productivity). 128K context, vision, function calling. Available globally via Volcano but billing is RMB-default.
Editor's verdict
If your audience is mainland China, Doubao is one of the most pragmatic picks — cheap, Mandarin-native, available with stable PRC infrastructure (no VPN needed for end-users). Quality is in the GPT-4o-mini class, not frontier. For Taiwan/HK/SG builders the answer is murkier: data residency in China, billing friction, and no real advantage over Qwen or DeepSeek for traditional-Chinese workloads.
Reviews
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Last updated: 2026-04-29