AI video cost per minute by finished length, 15 s to 10 min

Per-minute AI video cost is not one number: on Sume, a finished 15-second video costs about $9.24 per finished minute, a 60-second video about $7.97 and a 10-minute video about $7.86, all with Wan 3.0 clips at 720p. The reason is that clips scale with seconds while captions, music and the Timeline's minute rounding are fixed charges that short videos spread over fewer seconds.

The bigger gap is the model. The same lengths on Seedance 2.5 at 720p cost roughly $35 to $36 per finished minute. Numbers below are Sume billable rates, provider list times 1.25, read 2026-10-03, and the narration length uses an assumption of 15 characters per second.

The table

Generation is seconds times the per-second rate: Wan 3.0 at 720p bills $0.125 per second and Seedance 2.5 at 720p bills $0.5778 per second. Finishing adds narration at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, one caption job per started 60 seconds at $0.20, Timeline at $0.10 per started minute, and one $0.125 music track.

Wan 3.0 accepts clips of 2 to 30 seconds, so everything from 15 seconds to 10 minutes is built by stitching clips in the Timeline. Timeline accepts an output of up to 1,800 seconds.

Why short videos cost more per minute

Look at the finishing column. A 15-second video carries a full caption job ($0.20), a full Timeline minute ($0.10) and a music track ($0.125) against only 15 seconds of footage. That is $0.425 of fixed cost for 15 seconds, versus the same $0.425 spread across 10 minutes of a long cut.

Captions and Timeline both round up, so a 61-second video pays for two of each. If you can trim a 61-second cut to 60 seconds, you save $0.30.

How to use this when you quote

Quote video by the second for the clip model and by the job for finishing, then add them. A per-minute figure is useful for comparing models, but it hides the step at 60 seconds. The caption price is the fixed estimate for videos up to 60 seconds; for longer pieces, caption each 60-second cut, as this table assumes, and check the live price.

When a client asks for a price per minute, show them the 60-second and 180-second rows. They are the two lengths most feeds use.

What Sume does and does not do

Sume does not produce a 10-minute video in one call, and no listed model is priced per minute. It prices each clip, narration, caption and render job on its own, and reserves them at submit. Confirm the live numbers in the catalog before you commit.

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 = [
    ('Wan 3.0 720p clip seconds', 60, 0.125),
    ('Narration characters', 900, 0.0000475),
    ('Caption jobs', 1, 0.20),
    ('Timeline minutes', 1, 0.10),
    ('Music tracks', 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}")