20 faceless Shorts a month: finishing costs $8.50 on Sume

Twenty faceless Shorts a month cost $8.50 to finish on Sume if each gets one music track, one timeline render and one caption pass. That is $0.125 plus $0.10 plus $0.20, or $0.425 a Short, times 20. The footage and the voiceover are not in that number.

The prices are from the Music Router, Timeline 1.0 and Captions pages (read 2026-10-06). The timeline figure assumes each Short renders in one started minute.

Where the $0.425 goes

A faceless Short has three finishing jobs: a bed under the voice, an edit that joins clips to the audio and captions people can read with the sound off.

What is not counted

The visuals are the larger bill. Image or video generation, a voice track and any retries are priced per model, so add them from the model pages. A 20-Short plan with no retries is a floor, not a forecast.

One music bed can serve several Shorts. If you reuse a track across a week of uploads, the music line falls, and the total with it.

Making the month cheaper

Three choices move the total. Reuse one music bed across Shorts in the same series, which removes $0.125 from each. Keep the render inside one started minute, since the timeline bills per started minute. And send every caption job as one pass, because each caption request is its own $0.20.

None of this changes the creative. It only removes repeated steps. A month of 20 Shorts then costs a little less than $8.50, and you can see the exact figure in your usage after the first week.

Before you commit

Run one Short through the whole chain first and read the receipt on each job. The per-step prices above come from the docs, and your plan or credits may change what you are charged, so the first Short is the cheapest way to confirm the real figure.

Also decide where each file lives. Every tool takes media.sume.com URLs, so voiceover, footage and music all have to be imported or generated into your workspace before the timeline can use them. Do that step once per Short and keep the URLs in your own sheet.

Tradeoffs

Timeline renders default to 1080 by 1920, which suits Shorts. The captions tool takes sources of up to 60 seconds, so longer videos need splitting. And a channel that posts the same bed on every Short sounds repetitive, so budget a few extra tracks.