Animate a still for under $1: Grok Imagine from 5 cents, and the rest

If you are animating product shots, avatars or illustrations, a one-dollar ceiling per clip is a common budget. At five seconds and 720p, several Sume models fit under it, and one of them costs 7 cents. The catch for the cheapest row is that it works only from an image.

The table lists billed prices (list x 1.25, rounded up to the cent per job) for a 5-second clip from a first-frame image.

Five-second image-to-video, ranked by price

What the 7-cent row cannot do

Grok Imagine Video 1.5 in the Sume catalog is image-to-video only: no text-to-video, no end frame, no references, no audio and no aspect_ratio field. It requires image_url or a first frame, and runs at 480p or 720p for 4 to 15 seconds at one flat per-second rate. If the still is wrong, you cannot steer the framing with the request, so crop the image first.

Everything else under a dollar adds something. Kling 3 accepts a start and an end frame, Wan 3.0 accepts references, and Omni Flash gives synced audio. Pay the extra 50 to 90 cents when the clip needs one of those.

A request for the cheapest row

Send the image as a first_frame in frame_images. The URL must be public HTTPS.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/videos \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"grok-imagine-video-1.5","prompt":"Slow push-in, steam rising from the cup","duration":5,"resolution":"720p","frame_images":[{"type":"image_url","image_url":{"url":"https://example.com/cup.png"},"frame_type":"first_frame"}]}'