Agency price sheet: AI video cost basis at 2x and 3x markup

An agency that bills a finished 15-second Reel at 3x markup charges $6.9321 against a Sume cost basis of $2.3107. At 2x the same Reel is $4.6214.

Costs are Sume billable amounts read on 2026-10-03, from Wan 3.0 at 720p plus narration, captions, Timeline and music; the carousel is eight GPT Image 2.5 medium-quality images at an estimated $0.0165 each. Markups are examples, not recommendations.

The price sheet

Use the cost basis as a floor rather than a price list. Revision rounds, review time and account management are not in these numbers.

Retakes belong in the basis

A Reel that needs three takes has a footage line three times larger. At three takes the 15-second Reel basis is $6.0607 instead of $2.3107. Put the average takes per keeper in your sheet instead of the best case.

Packages

A monthly retainer of 8 carousels and 4 Reels has a production basis of $10.2988; at 3x that is $30.8963 before any human time.

Method and assumptions

Cost basis equals the Sume billable amount: provider list times 1.25. Narration is 225 characters for 15 seconds and 450 for 30 seconds, at 15 characters per second and $0.0000475 per character. Captions are $0.20 per job, Timeline $0.10 per started minute, music $0.125 per track.

Markup is applied to the whole basis, which makes the sheet look simple. In practice an agency may mark up the footage and the finishing differently, because finishing is the part clients see as labour.

The 2x and 3x columns are arithmetic, not a view on what the market pays. A client price should come from your costs, your time and your competitors.

What Sume does and does not do

Sume prices every job at submit from the billable-rate tables (provider list times 1.25). It does not publish, schedule or measure anything, so the posting side of the plan is yours. Confirm current rates in the catalog before quoting.

Rerun the arithmetic

The same line items as a short script, so you can change a quantity and see the total. It is plain arithmetic on the rates in this post; it does not call the Sume API.

# Sume billable USD rates, read 2026-10-03. Edit the quantities.
lines = [
    ('Reel footage seconds', 15, 0.125),
    ('Narration characters', 225, 0.0000475),
    ('Caption job', 1, 0.20),
    ('Timeline minute', 1, 0.10),
    ('Music track', 1, 0.125),
]
total = 0.0
for label, qty, unit in lines:
    cost = qty * unit
    total += cost
    print(f"{label:<46}{qty:>8g} x {unit:<10g} = ${cost:,.2f}")
print(f"{'Total':<46}{'':>8}   {'':<10}   ${total:,.2f}")