60-second Shorts: monthly cost at 3, 5 or 7 a week by AI model

A 60-second YouTube Short made from generated clips costs $7.97 on Wan 3.0 at 720p and $35.14 on Seedance 2.5 at 720p. At five a week for four weeks that is $159.36 against $702.72. The posting cadence multiplies the bill, but the model decides how large it is.

Sixty seconds is our planning length. Every number is a Sume billable amount (provider list times 1.25), read from the pricing package and docs on 2026-10-03. Narration assumes 900 characters, which is 15 characters per second; replace it with your script.

The monthly table

Wan 3.0 and Omni tie because both bill $0.125 per second at 720p: Wan takes one 60-second job as two 30-second clips and Omni takes six 10-second clips. Seedance 2.0 Mini takes clips of up to 15 seconds, so a Short is four clips.

A four-week month is used so that the arithmetic is exact: cost each times shorts per week times four.

What one Short is made of

For the Wan route the clip is the bulk, 94 percent of the total. On Seedance 2.5 the clip is 99 percent. The finishing stack is the same on every route.

A 60-second Short needs one caption job because the fixed caption price covers videos up to 60 seconds, and one Timeline minute. A 61-second Short would need two of each.

Choosing a cadence

Going from 3 to 7 Shorts a week more than doubles the bill. If budget is fixed, divide it by the per-Short cost to get the number you can afford: a $100 month buys 12 Wan Shorts or 2 Seedance 2.5 Shorts.

Mixing is allowed. Run the hook-heavy Shorts on the better model and the explainers on the cheap one.

Three ways to bring the number down

First, drop the music track on Shorts that use an original sound or a licensed track from elsewhere: that saves $0.125 each, or $2.50 on twenty Shorts. Second, reuse one narration voice and a template script structure so that retakes are rare; a retake of a single 30-second Wan clip costs $3.75. Third, run the opener on a stronger model and the rest on a cheap one: a 10-second Seedance 2.5 opener ($5.78) plus 50 seconds of Wan ($6.25) is $12.03 of footage instead of $7.50 or $34.67.

None of this changes the fixed part, which is one caption job and one Timeline minute for any Short up to 60 seconds. If a Short runs to 61 seconds, those two lines double, so check the final length before the render.

What Sume does and does not do

Sume generates and assembles the file; it does not upload to YouTube. Confirm rates in the catalog before you commit. Totals use the per-character narration rate without cent rounding, so a real bill can differ by a cent or two.

Rerun the arithmetic

The same line items as a short script, so you can change a quantity and see the total. It is plain arithmetic on the rates in this post; it does not call the Sume API.

# Sume billable USD rates, read 2026-10-03. Edit the quantities.
lines = [
    ('Wan 3.0 720p clip seconds, 20 Shorts x 60', 1200, 0.125),
    ('Narration characters', 18000, 0.0000475),
    ('Caption jobs', 20, 0.20),
    ('Timeline minutes', 20, 0.10),
    ('Music tracks', 20, 0.125),
]
total = 0.0
for label, qty, unit in lines:
    cost = qty * unit
    total += cost
    print(f"{label:<46}{qty:>8g} x {unit:<10g} = ${cost:,.2f}")
print(f"{'Total':<46}{'':>8}   {'':<10}   ${total:,.2f}")