Narration budget for a daily short-video channel: 30 videos a month
Thirty 750-character narrations a month cost $1.20 on Sume TTS with per-job rounding. The same characters are about $0.50 on MAI-Voice-2.1 and $0.34 on Flash.
A channel that posts one short a day needs about 30 narrations a month. At roughly 750 characters per minute of speech, a 60-second script is 750 characters, a 45-second script is about 560, and a 30-second script is about 375 (Unreal Speech's rule of thumb that one minute is roughly 750 characters, read 2026-10-06). Those are planning figures; measure your own voice and pace.
This post prices a month of narration only, not video, captions or music.
A month of narration at three lengths
| Script | Characters x 30 | Sume per month | MAI-Voice-2.1 | Flash |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30s (375 chars) | 11,250 | $0.60 | $0.247 | $0.169 |
| 45s (563 chars) | 16,890 | $0.90 | $0.372 | $0.253 |
| 60s (750 chars) | 22,500 | $1.20 | $0.495 | $0.338 |
Retakes
The honest number includes retakes. If one in three scripts is regenerated once after a voice or wording change, the 60-second row grows by a third: $1.60 on Sume instead of $1.20. Fix the text before you generate and the retake rate falls.
What to do with the savings
On all three lengths the difference between Sume and the cheapest MAI tier is about a dollar a month. For a channel this size, narration price is not the constraint; render time and the editing pipeline are. Choose by voice quality, language coverage and how well the audio plugs into the rest of your workflow.
Sources
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