What it costs to finish 100 holiday ads: captions, trim, timeline

Finishing 100 ads, with one trim, one caption job, a one-minute-or-shorter timeline render and one music track each, comes to about $44.50 at the prices in Sume's docs: $0.02 + $0.20 + $0.10 + $0.125 = $0.445 per ad. That excludes the video generation itself, which is billed per model at provider list times 1.25. Each page says to confirm live prices in GET /v1/catalog, so treat this as arithmetic and not a quote.

What are the per-step prices?

Where does the arithmetic stop being true?

• A render longer than one minute is billed for each started minute, so a 61-second ad is two.
• A caption job covers videos up to 60 seconds. Longer videos are outside the quoted price.
• Reusing one music track across ads removes that line. Generating a track per ad is the high case.
• Timeline planning with POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan is unbilled, so check the estimate before a batch.
• Retries with the same Idempotency-Key do not create a second job, but a new key is a new charge.

How do I check it before spending?

Call GET /v1/catalog with your key and compare each line to the table. Then dry-run the plan step for a sample timeline and read estimated_cost_usd_micros in the plan response. The generation step is the big variable: choose the model and clip length with GET /v1/videos/models, multiply by the resolution price, and add 25 percent, which is how Sume bills provider list.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/plan \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "audio": { "mode": "silence", "duration_seconds": 15 },
    "video": [
      { "source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/ad.mp4", "start": 0, "duration": 15 }
    ]
  }'

Which steps can I skip?

Not every ad needs every step. A clip that already has burned-in text does not need the $0.20 caption job, which saves $20.00 across 100 ads. A clip that is already the right length does not need the $0.02 trim. If a bed of music is shared across a family of ads, the $12.50 line becomes $0.125. The cheapest finishing path is the one that avoids work the generation step already did.

What does it leave out?

It leaves out generation, speech-to-text if you transcribe separately, any storage you keep outside Sume, and your own time reviewing 100 clips. For the generation side, see the per-SKU cost post. A holiday test usually costs less if you finish ten ads first, read the totals, and then scale.