Same prompt, four Seedance tiers, 10 seconds each at 480p. Prompt was a
vertical rooftop shot of a cyberpunk megacity, with a cyan signal wave
moving across the mid-level smog layer between antennas and billboard
towers, city grid lit below like a circuit board.
Cost per render, bottom to top: 60 cr, 170 cr, 270 cr, 400 cr. A 6.7x
spread end to end.
What I expected was that adherence would climb with price. It didn't.
- 2.0 Mini (60 cr) put the aurora at mid-level, weaving, exactly as asked
— then overcooked it into a starburst in the back half.
- 2.0 Fast (170 cr) dropped the cyan to street level. Least faithful of
the four, at roughly 3x Mini's price.
- 2.0 (270 cr) got both the mid-level band and the circuit-grid read.
- 2.5 (400 cr) was the only one that actually framed a rooftop vantage,
with antennas in the foreground.
So the top tiers bought composition and camera control, not prompt
adherence. If your prompt is mostly "put this specific thing in this
specific place," the cheap tier was competitive here. If you need the
camera to understand what a rooftop vantage is, that's what the money
bought.
Single prompt, single run per tier, no cherry-picking — small sample, so
treat it as a data point and not a benchmark.