Draft at 480p, finish at 1080p: three drafts and a final for $22.29

Three 10-second Seedance 2.5 drafts at 480p ($2.69 each) plus one 1080p final ($14.22) cost $22.29 on Sume, against $42.66 for three attempts made directly at 1080p (as of 2026-10-08).

The two plans

Plan A drafts cheaply: 3 x 269 + 1422 = 807 + 1422 = 2229 cents. Plan B tries at full resolution: 3 x 1422 = 4266 cents. The saving is 2037 cents, or 48%.

A caveat about drafts

A draft is only a guide. A new generation at another resolution is a new job, not an upscale, so the final can differ from the draft even with the same prompt. The seed parameter is accepted but the docs say results are not deterministic on every provider, so do not count on an exact repeat.

Use drafts to test the things that are stable: the prompt wording, the shot description, the reference images and the camera move.

Where the break-even is

Drafts pay off when each 1080p attempt would have been repeated. If your first 1080p attempt would be accepted 100% of the time, plan B at one try is $14.22 and cheaper than plan A at $22.29. Drafting wins from the second expected attempt: two 1080p tries cost $28.44, still above $22.29.

The same logic works on Wan 3.0, where 10 s is $0.63 at 480p and $2.50 at 1080p. The absolute saving is smaller because the final is already cheap.

Same plan on other rows

On Wan 3.0, three 480p drafts of 10 s plus a 1080p final cost 3 x $0.63 + $2.50 = $4.39, against $7.50 for three 1080p tries. On Seedance 2.0 Mini at 10 s, three 480p drafts and a 1080p final cost 3 x $0.88 + $4.26 = $6.90, but Mini tops out at 15 s.

A common split is to draft on a cheaper model and finish on a dearer one. Because models differ in look, a Mini draft predicts motion and layout, not the exact finish of a 2.5 final.

Check the number yourself

To confirm the figure behind this post, read the seedance-2.5 entry from GET /v1/video-router/models and check that 10 s and 480p are inside its duration_seconds and resolutions. The grid price for that cell is 269 cents ($2.69). It is the provider list price times 1.25, rounded up to the next cent for the job, as of 2026-10-08.

Use an Idempotency-Key on every create call so a retry cannot start a second paid job, then poll the job until it is complete and download the file from the result. Media inputs for Timeline or for references must be hosted files, so import them first.

None of the prices here say anything about picture quality, motion or how well a model follows a prompt. Prices can change when a provider changes its list, which is why every table carries a date. Re-read the catalog before you commit a large batch, and run one test job at the exact setting you plan to use.