$30 creative test: 40 stills or 6 clips? Image vs video budget

On Sume a still costs far less than a clip, so a $30 creative test should start with images. Forty Ideogram 4.5 stills at medium quality cost $3.00, and six 5-second Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 clips at 720p cost $3.75. Both together are $6.75, which leaves $23.25 of a $30 wallet.

Ideogram 4.5 lists at $0.03, $0.06 and $0.22 per image by quality in the Sume image docs. fal lists Omni Flash 1.1 at $0.10 per second at 720p (read 2026-10-07). Sume bills list times 1.25 on both.

Cost per idea

The number that matters is how many ideas you can test per dollar. A still tests a concept, a layout and a headline; a clip tests motion and pacing as well. The table puts one figure on each.

A staged split

Spend about a third on stills first. Forty medium stills at $3.00 give you 40 concepts. Pick the best six, and animate each from its still as a 5-second clip at 720p for $3.75. The stage costs $6.75 in total.

A still at medium costs $0.075, so one 5-second 720p clip is worth 8 stills. Testing 40 ideas as clips would cost $25.00, which is more than the whole wallet.

• Judge composition, copy and product visibility on stills.
• Judge motion, pacing and the first second on clips.
• Animate only the stills that already passed the first check.

A second round at higher quality

Say two of the six clips win. Re-render each at 1080p for 5 seconds at $0.9375 apiece, or $1.875 together. If one of the winning stills needs polish, a high-quality Ideogram 4.5 still is $0.275.

Add it up: forty medium stills ($3.00), six 720p clips ($3.75), two 1080p finals ($1.875) and one high-quality still ($0.275) come to $8.90. That is the whole $30 test with $21.10 spare.

The shape is the point: many cheap images, few clips, fewer finals. Each stage cuts the count by a factor of about six.

Rule of thumb

Spend roughly a third of a test wallet on stills, a third on first clips, and keep a third for finals and retakes. On $30 that is about $10 for stills, $10 for clips and $10 held back. The exact split matters less than the order: stills first, clips second, finals last, so the expensive stage only sees ideas that survived the cheap ones.

What the leftover buys

The remaining $23.25 covers retakes. Three more 5-second clips at 720p cost $1.875, or ten more stills at medium cost $0.75. Use the second option if the stills disappoint, and the first if the motion does.

Check the balance before the run. If the wallet cannot reserve a job's estimate at submit, the request returns 402 insufficient_credits before provider work starts. See per-image list prices for other image models, and how far $20 goes on video for a smaller wallet.