Cheapest way to start on Sume video: Pro $40 plus a $10 top-up

The cheapest way to start with video on Sume is the $40 a month Pro plan plus a $10 wallet top-up, so $50 for the first month if you assume the plan includes no usage. That $10 buys 80 seconds of Wan 3.0 video at 720p, or three 5-second Seedance 2.5 clips at 720p, or a thousand minutes of transcription. The pricing page's FAQ says Pro is where video generation starts, and that wallet purchases run from $10 to $1000.

What each step is

The pricing page lists Free, Pro at $40 a month, Startup at $120 and Scale at $400. Its FAQ says Free includes image generation and limited Agent access, and that paid plans add video generation, Formats, API, CLI and MCP access, commercial use and the full catalog. It also says teams can fund a shared wallet with on-demand purchases from $10 to $1000, and that usage is billed at each model's published USD rate.

The billing docs say you buy credits from the Billing and subscription page, and that the public API reads balance and usage but cannot create a top-up. A top-up is a dashboard action.

What $10 buys

Each figure divides $10 by the Sume rate from the API pricing page or the video docs, rounded down. Seedance 2.5 at 720p for 5 seconds is $2.889 on Sume, and Wan 3.0 at 720p is $0.125 per second.

What it does not tell you

The plan cards on the pricing page are where to check whether a plan includes any usage. If a plan does include some, your first-month cash outlay is lower than $50, and the arithmetic here is the upper bound. If it does not, $40 is the cost of access and concurrency and the rest is pay-per-use.

Jobs reserve their price at submit, so the balance must cover the whole reservation. A 30-second Seedance 2.5 job at 1080p needs far more than $10 on hand even if you only meant to generate a short clip, so size the top-up to the largest job you plan to submit. A $10 balance is a good test budget for short Wan clips, and too small for long Seedance jobs, where one 30-second 1080p clip can cost several times that. Keep the first runs short, check the cost on the usage page, then raise the clip length.

• Wan 3.0 720p, 5 seconds: $0.625.
• Seedance 2.5 720p, 5 seconds: $2.889.
• Seedance 2.5 1080p, 5 seconds: $7.10775.

If you only need images

The Free plan covers image generation, so image-only testing does not require the $40. Usage is still billed at the published rate, so a $10 balance would buy about 607 medium-quality GPT Image 2.5 images at 1024x1024, or 400 images on the $0.025 models. That is the lowest-cost way to see Sume output before you decide on video.

Yearly and later months

After month one, the plan fee repeats and usage varies. Pro costs $432 a year, or $36 a month, if you pay yearly. Start monthly while you learn your volume, then switch when your usage is steady. The saving is $48 a year on Pro, which is real money but not worth locking in before you know your volume and the product fits. Check live prices on the pricing page before you pay.