$50 of avatar video on Sume: 271 s Standard, 204 s Plus, 90 s Max

Fifty dollars buys 271 seconds of Sume avatar video at Standard, 204 seconds at Plus and 90 seconds at Max, counting whole seconds with no product image. That is $49.86, $49.98 and $49.50.

How the numbers come out

Rates: Standard $0.184, Plus $0.245, Max $0.55 per second without a product image; $0.194, $0.258, $0.58 with one (Sume pricing page, as of 2026-10-08). Divide the budget by the rate and round down.

Turning seconds into clips

Clips must be 4 to 60 seconds. $50 at Standard covers four 60-second jobs and one 31-second job (271 s). At Plus, three 60-second jobs and one 24-second job. At Max, one 60-second job and one 30-second job.

If the avatar does not exist yet, subtract the $0.95 creation fee first: $49.05 leaves 266 seconds at Standard (266 x $0.184 = $48.944), 200 seconds at Plus ($49.00) and 89 seconds at Max ($48.95).

• Add a product image and the counts fall: 50 / 0.194 = 257 s at Standard.
• Joining clips on Timeline costs $0.10 per started output minute.
• Keep a reserve for retakes; a failed or rejected script is cheaper to fix before submit.

Using the budget well

Draft at Standard, finish at Plus or Max. Because preview stills are tier-independent, an approved preview can be rendered at a higher tier without a new preview, so the cheap pass does not have to repeat the setup.

Practical notes

Reusable avatars. An avatar is created once, for a flat $0.95, and then referenced by its avatar_handle on every later request. Sume normalizes a leading @ away and stores the handle without it. Treat the handle as a stable identifier in your own system, and keep one record per handle noting who the avatar represents and what it may be used for.

Idempotency. The docs examples send an Idempotency-Key header on every create call. Use one key per intended job and reuse it only when you retry the same request. A network timeout followed by a fresh submit with a new key is the one path that can create, and bill, a second job. Keep keys human-readable, such as the campaign and scene, so a support lookup is easy.

Quality tiers. quality accepts standard, plus and max. Plus is the default when you omit it. Standard is the fastest Sume execution path, and Max is the highest quality tier with slower turnaround. Because the three differ in both price and speed, decide the tier per stage of your workflow: a quick pass to confirm wording, then a final render once the script is settled.

Job lifecycle. Every Sume avatar request is job-backed. You submit, store the job id, and poll GET /v1/jobs/{id}/status until it completes, then read GET /v1/jobs/{id}/result. The shared lifecycle also lets you wait with sync or subscribe mode for a limited time instead of polling, and the result carries Sume-hosted artifacts rather than provider URLs, so you never handle a provider queue id. Plan your client around the job, not around a single blocking response.