Agency Batch of 10 Clips: Draft at 480p, Final at 1080p, Priced

The short answer

Ten 8-second clips on Seedance 2.5 cost about $152.41 if you draft at 480p, revise 4 clips twice at 480p, and render the 10 approved clips at 1080p. Rendering every round at 1080p costs about $341.17 for the same three rounds. Prices are Sume list values: Seedance 2.5 is $0.268677 per second at 480p and $1.42155 at 1080p (catalog read 2026-10-08).

The plan

Seedance 2.5 accepts 4 to 30 seconds per clip, with 480p, 720p and 1080p. Resolution is the cost lever, since price scales linearly with seconds inside the model's range. A 480p draft shows motion, framing and the idea the client is approving; it will not show fine detail, so keep surface-level questions (skin, text, logo edges) for the 1080p pass and say so in the client note.

Send each job to POST /v1/video-router/generate or POST /v1/videos with model: seedance-2.5, duration: 8 and the target resolution. Use one Idempotency-Key per clip and per round, for example client42-clip07-r2.

Set a spend cap before the batch

Docs list dry_run=true and max_spend_usd as optional gates on MCP write and paid tools, and generation_admission_preview for an admission and cost preview before an expensive burst. Sume enforces max_spend_usd only if you provide it, so set it for every batch. Use the preview first for a batch you have not run before.

On the queue side, plan capacity decides how many of the 10 jobs run at once: Pro runs 4 and queues up to 20, Startup runs 8. A 402 insufficient_credits fails before provider work starts, so a low balance cannot leave half a batch generating, but check the balance with balance_get before you submit.

• Show the client the seconds and the resolution on each draft.
• If the client asks for a fifth revision of one clip, price it as 8 x $0.268677 = $2.15 at 480p.
• Draft with a short duration when you can: Seedance 2.5 bills a minimum of 4 seconds.

When 480p drafts are not worth it

If a clip is only 4 seconds, the saving per draft is 4 x ($1.42155 - $0.268677) = $4.61. At that size, the overhead of two stages may outweigh it. The method pays when there are many clips and more than one round.

Write the plan into the statement of work. Say how many draft rounds are included, what resolution each round is, and what a further round costs, using the per-clip figure of $2.15 at 480p. Agencies that quote revisions in seconds and resolution rarely argue about them later. Re-price the sheet whenever the catalog changes, since the live rate is in GET /v1/catalog, not in this page.