Captioning 250 holiday clips costs $50.00 at Sume's current estimate

At the current fixed estimate, each accepted standalone caption job reserves and captures $0.20 for a video of up to 60 seconds, so 250 holiday clips cost $50.00 in caption jobs. The docs mark that as an estimate and point to GET /v1/catalog and OpenAPI for the live price, so use the arithmetic below for planning and check the catalog before a large run.

Cost table

The multiplication is simple, and the limits are what matter: the price covers clips up to 60 seconds, and inline avatar-video captions are priced separately as an add-on in that estimate. A holiday campaign tends to produce many short cuts of the same offer, which is why the count grows faster than the footage: five cuts of fifty products is already 250 jobs.

Keep the figures in a planning sheet with a column for the live catalog price, so that if the number moves you change one cell and every row updates. The docs call the $0.20 a fixed estimate, which is a reason to treat it as a budget line and not as a quote.

Steps

Do the check in this order so a price change does not surprise you.

• Read the live caption price from GET /v1/catalog and compare it with $0.20.
• Confirm every clip is 60 seconds or shorter; longer clips are outside the stated estimate.
• Send one job per clip with its own Idempotency-Key, named after the clip, so a retry does not charge twice.
• Use restyle with source_caption_id for extra looks of the same clip, which is still a render at the same price.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not give a bulk discount on captions in the pages we read, and the docs do not describe a batch caption endpoint, so 250 clips means 250 requests. Spread them over time or in a small loop with backoff, and read the status of each job before you start the next phase of your pipeline. Inline captions on an avatar video are not a video_caption resource and are priced in the avatar estimate, so do not add them to this table.

Failed or canceled jobs are a second reason to read your usage after a run. The estimate describes an accepted job, so compare the number of accepted jobs with your spreadsheet of expected clips, and reconcile any gap before you report a campaign cost to anyone. This post does not assert what happens to the charge on a failed caption job, because the page we read does not say.

Budget habit

A good habit for a seasonal push is to set a ceiling before the work starts: the number of clips times the live price, plus a margin for reruns. If a reviewer asks for a different style on every clip, that is a second set of jobs at the same price, so ask for the look decision early and run it on three sample clips first.