Cheapest product video ad: six stills in a Timeline render for $0.30

The floor price of a product video ad on Sume is $0.30: six product photos placed in one Timeline render at $0.10, plus $0.20 for caption cues that carry the offer text. No video model is involved. A 15-second vertical ad built this way costs one-eleventh of the $3.425 five-clip version (five photos to one 15-second ad), and it is the right baseline to compare any motion clip against (prices read 2026-10-05).

What Timeline does with a still

The Timeline docs say stills are accepted in video[] as static holds; a motion field is accepted but ignored and reported as motion_ignored, so there is no pan or zoom on a still. What you do get is cuts and transitions: fade, wipeleft, wiperight, slideup, slidedown and dissolve, at 1 second or less, and four fit modes: cover, contain, stretch and blur. The output defaults to 1080x1920.

The docs list blur next to contain as a fit mode, so try contain or blur on square product shots to avoid cropping the product in a vertical frame; plan one test render to see how each looks.

The builder

This script builds a six-slot, 15-second body with a slideup transition between photos. Call POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan first; it is unbilled and returns the segment count and estimated cost.

import json


def still_ad(photos, seconds_each=2.5):
    video = []
    for i, url in enumerate(photos):
        slot = {"source_url": url, "start": i * seconds_each,
                "duration": seconds_each, "fit": "blur"}
        if i:
            slot["transition"] = {"type": "slideup", "duration": 0.25}
        video.append(slot)
    return {"audio": {"mode": "silence",
                      "duration_seconds": seconds_each * len(photos)},
            "video": video}


photos = ["https://media.sume.com/artifacts/demo/p%d.jpg" % n for n in range(1, 7)]
body = still_ad(photos)
print(body["audio"]["duration_seconds"], "s,", len(body["video"]), "slots")
print("render cost USD:", 0.10, "+ captions", 0.20)

Where stills win and where they do not

A still sequence is a slideshow, so it fits product ads where the picture is the point: sizes, colourways, bundles and offers. It does not show a garment move, a liquid pour or a gadget in use.

A practical split for a holiday catalog is stills for the long tail and motion for the leaders, which is the idea behind ranking SKUs by profit. Hundred-SKU totals are simple: 100 still ads cost $30.00, 100 Wan ads cost $342.50. Caption cues must carry text with start and end, as in the promo code recipe.