A 61-second Short bills two Timeline minutes: price each length

What does assembling a 61-second Short cost on Sume?

Two Timeline minutes. The Timeline 1.0 docs list a public rate of $0.10 per ceil(output minute), and the reserve is ceil(audio.duration_seconds / 60) minutes. A 60-second render rounds to 1 minute, which is $0.10. A 61-second render rounds up to 2 minutes, which is $0.20. One second of extra length doubles that line of the bill.

That matters for Shorts because the common lengths cluster around a minute. Trimming a 61-second draft to 60 seconds, or deciding to go properly long, is a cost decision as well as a pacing one.

Price each length

The arithmetic below uses only the documented Timeline rate and applies the ceiling to the declared length. It covers the assembly render alone, not the clip generation, music or captions.

Where YouTube's line falls

YouTube's help page on three-minute Shorts says a Short is a video up to three minutes long with a square or vertical aspect ratio, and that a wider ratio such as 16:9 keeps a video from being classified as a Short. On the cost table, 180 seconds is the last length that costs $0.30; a 181-second render is both over the Shorts limit and a fourth billed minute.

The two lines do not align everywhere. YouTube's line is at 180 seconds, while the billing steps are at every 60 seconds. A 125-second Short costs the same as a 180-second one, so if the story needs two minutes, you may as well use the full third minute for the same $0.30.

Captions have their own ceiling

Video captions are priced separately. The docs give a fixed $0.20 per accepted job for videos up to 60 seconds under the current estimate and say to confirm it in the catalog. They do not state a figure for longer clips, so this post does not extrapolate one. For a 90-second Short, plan on testing the caption call at that length and reading the quoted price in the catalog before you batch it.

A 60-second Short with captions is therefore $0.10 for the render plus $0.20 for the captions, $0.30 together, excluding the clip and any music. The same Short at 61 seconds is $0.20 for the render and an unstated caption price. Keeping a Short at or under 60 seconds is the one length where both documented prices are known.

Check the number before you submit

POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan runs the schema and URL checks and the compiler, and returns duration_seconds, segment_count, billable_minutes and estimated_cost_usd_micros without creating a job or reserving credits. It needs no idempotency key. The docs note that a plan cannot predict warnings about short sources being padded or looped.

For a deeper look at how rounding works across endpoints, see how billing rounds up on Sume endpoints, and for the three-minute build itself, the three-minute Short walkthrough.