Estimate a video render cost before you pay: Sume timeline plan

You can check what a Sume timeline render will cost before you pay by calling the plan endpoint. POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan runs the schema check, the Sume media host check and the compiler, then returns billable_minutes, estimated_cost_usd_micros, duration_seconds, segment_count and a filtergraph_summary. It creates no job, reserves no credits and downloads no media, and it needs no Idempotency-Key.

What the plan does and does not tell you

The public render rate is $0.10 per output minute, rounded up, so billable_minutes is the number to multiply.

Run it on the documented example

Swap in artifact URLs from your own workspace. For a 24-second output the plan should report one billable minute, which is $0.10.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/plan \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "audio": {"mode": "silence", "duration_seconds": 24},
    "video": [
      {"source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/intro.mp4", "start": 0, "duration": 8},
      {"source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/talk.mp4", "start": 8, "duration": 16}
    ]
  }'

Where it earns its place

Because a plan cannot see the files, the final render can still warn that a short source was padded or looped. Treat the estimate as the price and the warnings as the quality check.

• Batch jobs: sum billable_minutes across all plans before you submit anything.
• Agents: show the estimate to a person, then render on approval.
• Debugging: transition and slot errors come back at plan time, before you spend.

Budgeting a batch with plans

For a batch of 50 renders, call plan 50 times and add up billable_minutes. Each plan is free and does not reserve anything, so you can rebuild the batch as often as you like. Multiply the total by the $0.10 public rate, then compare it with your balance before you submit.

Plans are also a cheap test for agents. An agent that composes a timeline from a brief can plan it, show the minutes and the cost, and only then submit the render with an Idempotency-Key. The plan is not a reservation, so a render submitted later can still be refused if the balance changed in the meantime. Note that a plan does not download media, so a dead URL on the Sume host can pass a plan and fail the render. Probe your sources first if the batch is large.