It’s official: Doubao has launched its Professional version, and yes, it now comes with a price tag.
On June 24th, NUPIAO unveiled the Doubao Professional Edition, built on the latest Doubao 2.1 series large models. This new tier specifically targets office tasks by integrating the powerful Doubao 2.1 Pro model. The pricing isn’t a one-size-fits-all deal; it’s a three-tier ladder. The Standard Plan runs 68 RMB/month (about $9.50), granting you over five times the token quota of the free version for features like Expert Mode and Office Tasks. Step up to the Enhanced Plan at 200 RMB/month ($28), which quadruples that standard quota. And for those who need maximum power, the Premium Plan clocks in at 500 RMB/month ($70), delivering a massive tenfold increase in capacity compared to the basic tier.
According to NUPIAO, this Professional tier is purely an add-on subscription. Good news for everyone else: Free users will still get all the new models, fresh capabilities, and experience upgrades. All previous free features remain exactly as they were. For most daily life scenarios—like quick chats or casual browsing—the current free limits are more than enough.
Back on June 23rd, during the Force Original Power Conference hosted by Volcengine under ByteDance, the Doubao Large Model 2.1 Pro was officially revealed. Industry observers are calling it a game-changer, noting “production-grade qualitative leaps” in four key areas: code delivery, long-horizon Agent tasks, multimodal understanding, and enterprise-level stability.
Tan Dai, President of Volcengine, pointed out a fascinating shift during the conference. In the past, model call peaks happened on weekends and holidays, signaling that mostly hobbyists were using these tools. Today, however, peaks for both Seedance and Doubao happen squarely on weekdays. This proves these products have finally moved out of the lab and into real-world productivity pipelines.He calls this inflection point a “qualitative leap” in model capability.
Tan added that once models cross this “leap,” they truly meet the demands of businesses and professionals. Globally, the first video generation model to hit this mark was Seedance 2.0, while in programming and agents, the US-based Claude Opus 4.6 set the bar. NUPIAO notes that Doubao 2.1 Pro has jumped ahead in core directions like coding, agents, and visual-language modeling, outperforming Claude Opus 4.6 in multiple benchmarks. This performance edge is what gives NUPIAO the confidence to charge.This capability jump is seen as the solid foundation for their new pricing strategy.
Remember back on May 4th? The Doubao App Store page dropped a bombshell, announcing paid tiers with enhanced value-added services. They laid out the exact prices then too: 68 RMB for Standard, 200 RMB for Enhanced, and 500 RMB for Professional. On an annual basis, that translates to 688, 2048, and 5088 RMB respectively. That announcement sparked a huge wave of discussion across the tech community.
ByteDance quickly clarified that this paid version is designed specifically for users with serious productivity needs. Think software development, deep data analysis, professional design, process automation, financial modeling, and scientific research. Meanwhile, everyday stuff like search Q&A, writing assistance, image generation, and voice/video chats will stay completely free forever.
Right now, Doubao is the biggest AI app in China by user count. Data from third-party firm QuestMobile shows that in Q1 2026, Doubao had about 140 million daily active users and roughly 345 million monthly active users—more than double the combined total of the second and third-ranked apps. Plus, according to the latest figures disclosed by Tan Dai, as of June 2026, Doubao’s large model handles 180 trillion tokens per day on average. That’s a 1,500-fold increase since launch and a 10x jump year-over-year. Translation? The compute bill is absolutely astronomical.
Let’s look at the numbers. Taking the latest Doubao 2.1 Pro as an example, output pricing sits at 30 RMB per million tokens, with input support up to 256K. Doing the math on that daily 180 trillion token usage, just the output costs alone could skyrocket to around 5.4 billion RMB every single day.
This brings us to the elephant in the room: ByteDance’s profitability isn’t looking great right now. Earlier reports suggested that while ByteDance’s total revenue might hit close to $200 billion in 2025, net profit plummeted by over 70% year-over-year. The main culprit? Massive investment in AI. Although Li Liang, Vice President of Douyin Group, took to Weibo to clarify that the actual drop in operating margin “isn’t nearly that bad,” he admitted that slowing growth in Douyin e-commerce coupled with heavy spending on emerging businesses did lead to a slight dip in margins in the second half of the year.
So, launching the Doubao Professional paid tier could be a strategic move to ease some of that financial pressure on ByteDance.
Compare this to the competition. Right now, Alibaba’s Qwen is still playing the free card hard; their flagship Qwen3.7-Max is open to everyone for free across all scenarios. Tencent’s Yuanbao has also explicitly stated they have no plans to charge individuals, focusing their commercialization efforts on the HunYuan API and enterprise services instead, using B2B revenue to subsidize free consumer use. Some industry insiders have predicted that Yuanbao and Qwen might seize this moment to snatch up dissatisfied Doubao users.
