Holiday gift guide of 25 products: card, clip and voice cost on Sume

A holiday gift guide with 25 products costs about $10.43 on Sume if each product gets a medium-tier Ideogram 4.5 card, a 5-second Wan 3.0 clip at 480p and a 150-character voice line, and the whole guide is joined in one render of about two minutes (read 2026-10-06). The clip is the bulk of it, at $8.00. Cards are about $1.88, voices $0.25 and the render $0.30 for three output minutes.

The guide is a good case for a plan before spend. A list of 25 products is fixed in size, the unit prices are fixed, and the only moving part is retakes. The table below prices the guide with no retakes, and the section after it adds them.

A minute is not enough for 25 clips

Twenty-five clips of 5 seconds are 125 seconds, so the finished guide is over two minutes, and the timeline render bills $0.10 per output minute, rounded up. A 125-second guide is three output minutes and costs $0.30, so the guide total is about $10.43, as in the table. A tighter cut that uses 2 seconds of each clip fits in 50 seconds and one render minute.

The decision is editorial: do you want a long guide, or a fast one? The long one costs 20 cents more in render, which is nothing, but the shorter one is more likely to be watched to the end.

• Budget render minutes from the cut length, not the number of clips.
• Plan the retakes before you start: 5 retakes at $0.32 add $1.60.
• If a product needs a 1080p hero shot, price it separately as its own line.
• Use the unbilled timeline plan call to read the billable minutes before you pay.

Price the guide with retakes

This script prices the guide for a chosen cut length and retake count.

import math


def guide(products=25, cut_seconds=125, retakes=0):
    cards = products * 0.075
    clips = (products + retakes) * 0.32
    voice = products * 0.01
    render = math.ceil(cut_seconds / 60) * 0.10
    return round(cards + clips + voice + render, 2)


print(guide())
print(guide(cut_seconds=50))
print(guide(retakes=5))

What to hold back

Do not generate all 25 clips on the first pass. Start with five, one from each gift category, and build a 15-second sample cut. That is $1.60 for clips, $0.38 for cards, $0.05 for voices and $0.10 for a render, about $2.13 in total. If the sample feels right, extend it to the other 20 products with the same prompt structure, and if it does not, you have spent two dollars on finding out.

Keep the product list in a spreadsheet with one row per product: the card prompt, the clip prompt, the voice line and the job ids. A row that fails or disappoints can be redone alone, and the ledger makes it easy to see what is left. Gift guides are also reused, and the cost of the second cut is the render alone: a different aspect or length for another channel is $0.10 to $0.30, because the cards and clips already exist. Remember that the clips themselves must suit the new aspect ratio, so decide the aspect before you generate.

Before you publish

Read the cut at full speed before you spend on retakes, since most problems in a product montage are in the order and timing, which you can fix without paying for a new clip. Then regenerate only the shots that need it. The rates are in the pricing page, the video docs and the timeline docs, and the live job price comes back from the API when you submit.