Timeline render pricing: why 61 seconds costs twice what 60 does
Sume Timeline 1.0 charges $0.10 per ceil output minute, reserved from audio.duration_seconds. Price ladder from 30 s to 1800 s and a free plan call.
A 60-second timeline render costs $0.10 and a 61-second one costs $0.20, because Sume bills $0.10 per ceil(output minute) and reserves ceil(audio.duration_seconds / 60) minutes up front (Timeline 1.0). No provider inference is involved, only worker ffmpeg.
Price ladder
| Output length | Billable minutes | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 30 s | 1 | $0.10 |
| 60 s | 1 | $0.10 |
| 61 s | 2 | $0.20 |
| 120 s | 2 | $0.20 |
| 181 s | 4 | $0.40 |
| 600 s | 10 | $1.00 |
| 1800 s | 30 | $3.00 |
Trim to the minute
The cheapest fix for a 61-second edit is to make it 60. audio.duration_seconds sets the output length, from 1 to 1800 s, so shaving one second from the spine moves you down a bracket.
Plan before you render
POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan is unbilled. It returns duration_seconds, segment_count, billable_minutes and estimated_cost_usd_micros, and creates no job.
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": 61},
"video": [{"source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/a.mp4", "start": 0, "duration": 61}]
}'Sources
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Written by Sume