Tencent's Hy Image 3.5 Preview claims parity with ByteDance's Seedream, at $0.024 a 2K image (2026)

Tencent released Hy Image 3.5 Preview on September 22 and began rolling it into its own products the same day: the Yuanbao assistant, its film-editing and design tools, and an API on Tencent Cloud for developers. 1 2 Bloomberg reported the launch as Tencent's attempt to close the distance to ByteDance in image generation, on the same day rival Alibaba opened its Apsara conference. 2

Signal	Confirmed detail	What it means for you
What shipped	`hy-image-v3.5-preview`, an image endpoint that takes a prompt and reference images and returns the finished picture inside the same request. 3	No job queue and no polling loop: one call, one image.
Where it runs	Yuanbao (free), plus WorkRally, OnSolo, Miora and WorkBuddy, with the same model feeding Tencent Cloud's media and video-on-demand services. 1	Tencent shipped it into products before it shipped it into a developer console.
What it costs	0.15 yuan for a 2K image, or $0.024 on the international endpoint, charged on output images only. 1	Per-image pricing that undercuts most hosted competitors.
The size ladder	Left alone, the model picks a size up to 2K; a caller who passes `size` explicitly can get 4096×4096. 3	4K arrives as a parameter you set yourself.
The quality claim	In an internal blind test with hundreds of Tencent designers, the model scored 30% above its predecessor Hy Image 3.0, level with ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 Pro and slightly ahead of Google's Nano Banana Pro and Alibaba's Qwen-Image-3.0 Pro. 1	Tencent's own judges, with no scores published.

What developers actually get

The endpoint follows the chat/messages format. A caller sends text and optional reference images, and each round returns both the image and an assembled history of the exchange that the caller passes back with the next instruction. 3 Editing therefore continues from the previous picture rather than starting over, which is the difference between describing a change and re-describing the whole scene. 1

Results come back as signed URLs that expire after 12 hours, so an application downloads and stores them on its own side. 3 Tencent lists text rendering and layout, realism and style, and consistency while editing as the three areas this version improves. 1

Where the quality claim stands

The comparison Tencent published comes from a GSB blind test, a paired judgement in which designers see two images without being told which model made which, run across hundreds of its own staff. 1 Tencent gave one figure, the 30% margin over the previous version, and described the rest as parity or a slight lead. 1 Independent benchmarks of the model have yet to appear. 2

Usage is the other signal Tencent offers: the model ran inside Yuanbao for two months before launch, and image requests across the app rose by more than 50% over that period. 1