A week of five Reels: trim, captions, music and timeline priced

Five Reels a week, each with two trims, one music bed, one timeline join and one caption job, cost $2.325 a week at Sume's public per-job rates, about $9.30 over four weeks. That excludes any video generation and speech-to-text compute, which depend on the model and the clip.

Every rate below is from the Sume docs on the read date. The live numbers are in GET /v1/catalog, which is the one to trust if they differ.

The recipe and the per-Reel cost

The recipe assumes a 60-second Reel or shorter, so the timeline bills one started minute and the caption job stays within its 60-second price.

Week and month

What is not in the price

• Video generation. Each model is priced per second and listed in GET /v1/videos/models.
• Speech-to-text. $0.01 per audio minute in the inspect route, plus the Modal compute for the inspect itself.
• Retries. A job that fails or is canceled follows the credit rules in the docs; an accepted job is charged.
• Your own time to watch each Reel. Budget two minutes a Reel; no tool removes that.

Cutting the cost without cutting quality

Reuse one music bed for a week instead of five: the saving is $0.50 a week. Restyle captions with source_caption_id so speech-to-text does not run twice, though the render is still $0.20. Keep Reels under 60 seconds, since a 61-second timeline bills two started minutes. And use the unbilled plan call to price a render before you start it.

Scaling the recipe up or down

The per-Reel number is the useful one, because it scales linearly. Three Reels a week at $0.465 is $1.395; ten a week is $4.65. The only step that does not scale linearly is the timeline: it bills per started output minute, so a 61-second Reel costs $0.20 for the join, not $0.10. If a Reel runs a few seconds over a minute, trim the extra seconds with a $0.02 trim job, which is cheaper than paying for a second minute and keeps the Reel tighter.

A second place to watch is the caption job. The $0.20 price is for videos of up to 60 seconds under the current fixed estimate, so a longer Reel is a different line item. Read the live number in the catalog before you plan a month of long Reels, rather than multiplying this table.

How to use the number

Put the per-Reel cost next to the value of a Reel to you. If one Reel is worth a client call, $0.465 is nothing and the question is time. If you post twenty a week for twenty accounts, the question is the model spend and the retry rate. Track job ids and failed jobs for the first month, then adjust the recipe, not the budget.