52 weekly 20-second avatar announcements: yearly cost by tier

A 20-second avatar announcement every week for a year is 1,040 seconds of video. On Sume that is $191.36 at standard, $254.80 at plus and $572.00 at max, with a one-time $0.95 for the avatar itself. Weekly, that works out to $3.68, $4.90 and $11.00 per clip.

Full-year numbers

These use the per-second rates for talking video without a product image. Plans from other vendors are monthly, so a yearly figure is the fair comparison.

Where the budget moves

Because billing is per second of estimated length, trimming a script by two seconds saves $19.136 a year at standard.

• A product image raises each second by a small premium: $0.194 standard, $0.258 plus and $0.58 max.
• With a product image at standard, the year is $201.76, which is $10.40 more.
• Captions are inline and use the same styles as the video-captions job; a captions-stage failure is a soft failure.
• A script of about 20 seconds is the right size for a weekly update; the maximum job length is 60 seconds.

Keeping the batch safe

Use one Idempotency-Key per week so a retried request never creates a second charge. Balance is reserved when you submit, so keep enough for the next run; a short balance returns 402 insufficient_credits. The errors and credits page lists the codes.

Rounding and reservation

Each weekly job is reserved as exact USD micros and rounded up to whole cents at submit. At standard a 20-second clip is $3.68, which has no rounding, but at plus the 20 seconds come to $4.90 and a 17-second script would be $4.165 and reserve $4.17. Over 52 weeks those cents add up to a few dollars at most, so they do not change the yearly picture.

Capture happens when the job completes. If the render fails, the reservation is released, so a failed week costs nothing. If you cancel a queued job the same thing happens. This means a yearly budget set from the table is a ceiling for successful clips, not a promise of spend.

To stay inside a fixed budget, check your balance before each weekly submit. A balance that cannot cover the reservation returns 402 insufficient_credits and no job is created, which is easier to handle than a half-finished batch.

Plan the quarter, not the week

Most teams settle the script length once and then only change the words. Fix the clip at 20 seconds, pick the aspect ratio once (9:16 is the default), and keep the same avatar handle. That makes the yearly number predictable: 13 weeks at standard is $47.84, at plus $63.70, and at max $143.00. A quarterly top-up of that size keeps the balance ahead of the reservations.