64 transparent game item icons on $5: image plus cutout cost

A 64-icon game item set with transparent backgrounds costs $3.04 on Sume with Qwen Image plus background removal, and $4.64 with Recraft V4. Every icon is two billed steps: one image at the model's rate and one RMBG cutout at $0.0225.

The cutout is a fixed 2.25 cents whichever model drew the icon, so the model choice decides the bill. A five-dollar budget covers a full 64-icon set on Qwen Image even with every second icon redrawn once.

Per-icon cost with the cutout included

Prices are the Image Router catalog list rate for one image at default settings, times Sume's 1.25 margin, plus Sume RMBG 1.0 at $0.0225 per image. Ideogram 4.5 is shown at its default medium quality. The last column assumes 1.5 draws per icon, which is one redraw for every second icon, with one cutout per kept icon only if you cut out after choosing.

That last point is a real saving: draw first, review the sheet, and run RMBG only on the icons you keep. With 1.5 draws per icon but one cutout per kept icon, a Qwen Image set costs 64 x 1.5 x $0.025 plus 64 x $0.0225, which is $3.84. The table below is the pessimistic case that cuts out every draw.

Where the money goes

On Qwen Image the cutout is 47 percent of each icon's bill, so skipping a cutout saves almost as much as the draw. On Nano Banana 2 it is 18 percent, so there the draw is the lever. If your engine already supports a color key or you draw on a flat color you control, you can skip RMBG entirely and halve the cost of the cheap models.

Billing is per image, so batching requests does not change the price. A failed or filtered image is not a reason to resubmit blindly: read the job's receipt first, because the catalog rate is an estimate and the receipt is final. Sume also adds a 5.5 percent platform fee on spend, which is not in the table above.

For GPT Image models, the catalog states that a transparent request adds one RMBG per image on top of the image price, so the cutout column above applies there too. Check the catalog price at the size you request before committing a whole set, since those prices move with size and quality.

Keeping a set consistent

Style drift is the real cost in an item set, because a mismatched icon is a redraw. Lock the style in one sentence that every prompt repeats (palette, outline weight, lighting direction, camera angle), and put only the object name in the variable slot. Draw four icons first and look at the set before generating the other sixty.

For a related cost walk-through on photos, see removing backgrounds and upscaling 500 product photos, and for sheet-style pixel art see the GPT Image 2.5 sprite sheet prompt.