Faceless Short finishing cost: music, timeline, captions add to $0.425

Finishing one faceless Short on Sume costs $0.425 once the voice and the pictures exist: $0.125 for a music track, $0.10 for one timeline render minute and $0.20 for a caption job. Thirty Shorts a month is $12.75 of finishing. The expensive parts of a faceless channel are the visuals and the voice, which are priced separately by model.

The rates below come from Sume's model docs (read 2026-10-06). They are list prices, so check the live catalog before you budget.

The three finishing steps

Music is a fixed $0.125 per accepted generation on the Music Router, whichever engine it picks. Timeline 1.0 assembles one audio spine and ordered video slots and bills $0.10 per started output minute. Standalone captions are $0.20 for a clip of up to 60 seconds.

What the number does not include

The table leaves out the voiceover, the stills or clips, and any retries. It also assumes each Short is 60 seconds or less, because the timeline bills by the started minute: a 61-second Short is two minutes and costs $0.20 for that step. Keep the cut at 60 seconds or under if the extra second is not earning its dime.

Captions are the biggest line at $0.20, and they are the step where a mistake is cheapest to fix: restyling reuses the existing transcription, and the price stays the same because a restyle is still a render.

Where to save

Reuse one music bed across a week of Shorts instead of generating a new one each time; the timeline soundtrack can duck under the voice. Draft the visuals with a cheaper model before you spend on a finish. And batch the render step, since each Short is still one timeline job.

The tradeoff is sameness. A channel that reuses one bed and one caption style for every Short is cheaper and easier to recognize, but viewers can tire of it. Budget a fresh bed every few Shorts if the channel depends on repeat viewing.