Adobe Express Premium $9.99: trim, crop, captions vs Sume per job

Adobe Express Premium at $9.99 a month lists Caption Video and Merge, Crop and Trim quick actions, and the same three jobs on Sume cost $0.02, $0.02 and $0.20 per clip. For fifty clips a month that is about $12.00 on Sume against a flat $9.99 on Express, so the flat plan wins above about 42 clips a month, and Sume wins below that or whenever you drop the caption step. Adobe's pricing page (read 2026-10-03) is the source for the Express side.

The trigger this week is length. Instagram Reels now run to 3 minutes per Metricool (read 2026-10-03), so many accounts re-cut a longer master into several shorter posts. That is a batch job, and batch is where an API and a browser editor part ways.

What Adobe's page lists

Premium is $9.99 a month with 250 generative credits. Teams is listed at $4.99 a month for the first year and $7.99 after. The page lists Quick Actions including Caption Video, Resize Video, Merge, Crop and Trim, and Clip Maker, and says videos can run up to 2 hours on Premium and Firefly Pro plans.

The Sume equivalents

Each Express quick action maps to a Sume job with its own limits. Video trim cuts a range for $0.02, with a source up to 1800 seconds and an output up to 900. A crop is an op in video filter, $0.02, with x, y, width and height as fractions of the frame, each side at least 0.05, on sources up to 300 seconds. Video captions is $0.20 for a video up to 60 seconds. Merging is Timeline 1.0 at $0.10 per output minute.

The limits matter more than the prices. Express lists videos of up to 2 hours; Sume's trim source stops at 30 minutes and its filter source at 5 minutes, so a long master gets cut first. Sume prices a caption job for a video up to 60 seconds, so this post prices a 3-minute Reel as three parts.

def sume_batch(clips, trim=True, crop=True, caption=True):
    per_clip = (0.02 if trim else 0) + (0.02 if crop else 0) + (0.20 if caption else 0)
    return round(clips * per_clip, 2)

for n in (10, 25, 50, 100):
    print(n, "clips: trim+crop+caption", sume_batch(n),
          "| trim+crop only", sume_batch(n, caption=False))

Worked examples

A shop owner has a 3-minute product video and wants six 30-second vertical cuts with captions. Express: open the master, use the quick actions, export six files, all inside $9.99. Sume: six trims at $0.02, six crops at $0.02 and six captions at $0.20, so $1.44. In dollars Sume is cheaper for one video; in minutes of your time Express wins unless you script it.

Fifty clips a month with everything on is $12.00 on Sume and $9.99 on Express. Without captions, because the editor you already use burns them, it is $2.00 against $9.99. Over a hundred clips with captions, Sume reaches $24.00, now more than twice Express Premium.

One more factor is the pipeline around the edit. An Express export is a file you download. A Sume job returns a URL and a job id, so a cron job can pick it up and publish. If you run the edit once a month, that does not matter. If you run it daily, it does.

What Sume does and does not do here

• Sume does not ship templates, stock or a drag-and-drop editor.
• Sume crops by fractions you supply; it does not detect faces or reframe to a subject.
• Sume bills each job separately at a fixed public rate; a crop check with POST /v1/video-filter/check is free.
• Sume's caption job needs audible speech, or authored cues for silent clips.

What to do

Use Express when one person makes a handful of edits a week and wants templates. Use Sume when edits repeat on a schedule or come from a queue. Price your own batch with the calculator, and drop the caption step first if you need to cut cost.

Keep one sample batch of ten clips to test with, and note how long the manual route takes you end to end.