Black Friday 2026 AI video budget: a 55-day plan from Oct 3

Black Friday falls on November 27, 2026, which is 55 days after October 3 (Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26). That is enough time for a staged plan instead of a single scramble, and staging matters for cost: the cheapest place to find a bad idea is a 480p five-second screen, not a final render. This post splits the 55 days into four phases and prices every phase from Sume's billed rates.

Every figure below is a Sume billed rate, read from the API pricing page on 2026-10-03. Video models are billed at provider list times 1.25; the rates already include it.

What does each phase buy?

Phase one is cheap discovery. Wan 3.0 bills per second by resolution only, and 480p is $0.0625 per second, so a five-second screen is $0.3125. Forty screens cost $12.50 and cover forty distinct hooks, angles or product framings.

Phase two spends on the winners. Seedance 2.5 bills by tokens, which depend on frame size and duration, so a 15-second 720p 9:16 clip is $8.667. Six heroes cost about $52. Phase three renders final cuts of the survivors on Wan 3.0 at 1080p, where ten seconds is $2.50 and six of them are $15. Phase four is captions at a flat $0.20 per job.

Why is there a retake buffer?

Not every generation is a keeper, and a failed job is refunded but a clip you simply dislike is not. The table carries a 20 percent buffer on video spend. That figure is a planning assumption, not a measured rate; set it from your own keeper rate, which you can read from usage. The cost-per-keeper post shows the arithmetic.

The buffer is the line to change first. If your hit rate is lower than the plan assumes, the $15.90 buffer disappears quickly; if you run a handful of screens per idea, it is generous.

How do the phase dates matter?

Phase boundaries are chosen so each one ends before the next decision. Screens end October 16, heroes November 6, finals November 19, leaving the week of November 20 to 26 for captions, aspect ratios and last fixes before Black Friday itself. Cyber Monday is November 30, three days after Black Friday, so the same finals can carry through with a different caption.

Concurrency is per plan: Pro runs 4 jobs at once, Startup 8 and Scale 20, with a queue behind each. Forty screens on Pro take ten waves of four, which is fine across two weeks and not worth parallelizing.

What to do first

Fund the wallet for phase one only, run the screens, and read the usage page before committing to phase two. The reserve-on-submit rule means a balance too small for a request fails with 402 insufficient_credits rather than spending past you (Generation admission), so there is no way to overshoot the wallet by accident. For a smaller version of this plan see the $100 test budget.