Doubao 1.5 Lite
by ByteDance·China·Released
ByteDance's fast tier — the cheapest frontier-class API in China.
About this model
Doubao 1.5 Lite (January 2025) is ByteDance's cost-optimised tier — at $0.03/M input and $0.09/M output it's effectively free at the per-token level, the most aggressive pricing of any frontier-class API. The model targets high-volume Chinese consumer workloads where ByteDance's own products (Doubao app, Douyin features) drive most of the demand.
Like the Pro variant, Doubao 1.5 Lite is closed-weights and mainland-China focused. Architecture undisclosed beyond 'MoE'. The pricing strategy is consistent with ByteDance's broader pattern of using scale + integrated demand to undercut the Chinese AI market on raw API economics.
Strengths
- •Cheapest frontier-class API in China (and globally)
- •32K context covers most consumer workloads
- •Backed by ByteDance's massive Doubao consumer RLHF dataset
- •Aggressive Volcano Engine pricing across the family
Limitations
- •Closed weights, mainland data residency only
- •English quality lags Chinese significantly
- •Limited transparency on training data + safety
When to use it
- →High-volume Chinese consumer chat
- →Cost-sensitive Chinese-market classification / extraction
- →TikTok / Douyin-side AI features at scale
Architecture & training
MoE architecture, parameter counts undisclosed. Benefits from the same Doubao consumer RLHF corpus as the Pro tier.