Talking photo greeting: 8 seconds on Fabric 720p plus voice-over cost

A talking-photo greeting that runs 8 seconds on VEED Fabric 1.0 costs $1.50 at 720p and $0.80 at 480p, billed on the audio length. If you generate the spoken line with Sume text-to-speech, a 240-character message adds $0.0114. The whole greeting is about $1.5114 at 720p.

The price build-up

Fabric 1.0 takes a still image and an audio file and returns a video where the image speaks the audio. It is priced per second of audio, not per second of video, and the audio file must be Sume-hosted and under 10 MB. The maximum audio length is 300 seconds.

How the pieces fit

Write the line first, since the speech time sets the price. Eight seconds of speech is roughly 20 to 24 words. Generate the audio with text-to-speech, take its duration, and send it to Fabric with the image. The request body uses audio_url, duration_seconds, and either image_url or an avatar_handle if you already created one.

Using a handle instead of a loose image means you pay the $0.95 creation fee once, then reuse the face for later greetings. For a one-off card, a plain image URL avoids that fee.

• Keep the audio under 10 MB and host it on Sume first.
• Set duration_seconds to the true length of the audio file, since billing follows it.
• Use 480p for chat-size cards and 720p when the card will be shown full screen.

When to choose another route

Sume Avatar 1.0 talking video starts at $0.184 per second, which would be $1.472 for 8 seconds, but it speaks a script through an avatar. Fabric is the route when you already have the exact audio, for example a recorded voice message. MiniMax H3 Max Lip Sync starts at $0.0625 per second at 480p but needs 5 to 14.8 seconds of audio. See the model docs and the catalog.

Limits to check

A 300-second ceiling is far above any greeting, so the limit that matters is audio size. Compressed audio at 8 seconds is well under 10 MB. A failed job is not charged, because the reserved amount is refunded when a job fails or is canceled.