$1,000 Q4 ad test budget: 40 hook drafts and 10 finals on Seedance 2.5

Forty 6-second 9:16 hook drafts at 480p plus ten 15-second 9:16 finals at 720p cost $151.15252 on Sume with Seedance 2.5. That leaves $848.84748 of a $1,000 wallet for retakes. The drafts are $64.48252 and the finals are $86.67.

The numbers come from the way Seedance is metered. Sume bills it by video tokens, not by the second, so a clip price depends on pixels, seconds and the model rate. The Video Router docs describe the per-model catalog, and the credits page explains the USD wallet.

The token formula behind each line

Seedance tokens per clip are ceil(width x height x seconds x 24 / 1024). A 9:16 clip at 480p is 496 x 864 pixels, so one second is 10,044 tokens and six seconds is 60,264 tokens. The list rate for Seedance 2.5 is $0.0214 per 1,000 tokens, and Sume applies a 1.25 multiplier, rounded up in USD micros.

Hook draft: 60,264 tokens x $0.0214 / 1,000 x 1.25 = $1.612063. Final: a 15-second 720p 9:16 clip is 720 x 1280, which is 324,000 tokens, and 324,000 x $0.0214 / 1,000 x 1.25 = $8.667.

Why test hooks small

A hook decides whether a viewer stays past the first seconds, so it is the part worth many cheap tries. The final only needs to run for the hooks that survived. A 6-second 480p draft costs $1.612063, while the same 6 seconds at 720p costs $3.4668, so drafting small is 2.15 times cheaper per idea.

A 480p draft is a different render from the 720p final, so treat the draft as a test of the idea, not a preview of the pixels.

How to shift the split

Each additional 720p final at 15 seconds removes $8.667 from the wallet, which equals 5.38 hook drafts. If you want 20 finals instead of 10, the same arithmetic gives 40 x $1.612063 + 20 x $8.667 = $237.82252.

Sume reserves the estimated price when a job is submitted, captures it on success and refunds it if the job fails, so a failed draft does not stay on the bill. See errors and credits.

What to check before you spend

• Confirm the clip duration is inside the model range: Seedance 2.5 accepts 4 to 30 seconds.
• Keep the wallet above the sum of all in-flight reserves, since each job holds its estimate until it settles.
• Re-run the arithmetic if you change the aspect ratio: 4:3 and 3:4 add a few tokens per second.