Flixier Starter 60 export minutes for $19 vs Sume per-job pricing

Twenty 3-minute Reels cost about $18.00 on Sume, and Flixier Starter is $19 per seat for 60 export minutes and 120 subtitle minutes, which covers the same 20 Reels. So the two land within a dollar of each other, and the choice is whether you want an editor in a browser or a render you call from code. Flixier's pricing page (read 2026-10-03) is the source for the plan numbers below.

Longer Reels make this comparison newly relevant. Instagram Reels now allow 3 minutes per Metricool (read 2026-10-03), which means a captioned Reel is no longer a 30-second job. Sume's caption price is per video of up to 60 seconds, so length is where its cost climbs.

What Flixier lists

Free is $0 with 10 minutes of export a month, 5 minutes of subtitles, 720p and a watermark. Starter is $19 per seat per month for 60 export minutes, 120 subtitle minutes, 1080p and 20 GB of storage, no watermark. Creator is $39 per seat with unlimited exports, 1,500 subtitle minutes and 4K. Business is $69 per seat with unlimited exports and subtitles and unlimited storage. All plans include monthly AI credits; Creator lists 10,000, with extra packs of 50,000 to 300,000 credits at $10 to $60 a month. Annual billing is listed as 52 percent cheaper.

What Sume bills

Sume has two lines that matter. Timeline 1.0 bills $0.10 per output minute, rounded up. Video captions bills $0.20 per job for a video up to 60 seconds under its fixed estimate. The docs state no price above that, so this post assumes a 3-minute video is captioned as three 60-second parts, then joined: three caption jobs at $0.60, plus the render at $0.30.

Notice that the caption line is where Sume loses per-minute against a subtitle-minute allowance. Flixier Starter's 120 subtitle minutes for $19 is under $0.16 a minute if you use them all, and Sume's 60-second job works out to $0.20 a minute.

import math

def sume_reel(render_minutes=3, caption_jobs=3):
    return 0.10 * render_minutes + 0.20 * caption_jobs

reels = 20
total = reels * sume_reel()
print("20 three-minute Reels on Sume:", round(total, 2))
print("export minutes used:", reels * 3, "of 60 on Flixier Starter")
print("subtitle minutes used:", reels * 3, "of 120 on Flixier Starter")

Worked examples

A newsletter team makes 20 three-minute Reels a month. Flixier Starter: 60 export minutes and 60 subtitle minutes used, $19 for one seat. Sume: 20 renders at $0.30 is $6.00, and 60 caption jobs at $0.20 is $12.00, so $18.00. Add a second editor and Flixier is $38 while the Sume bill does not change with seats.

A 60-second teaser a day for 30 days: Sume is 30 captions at $0.20 plus 30 renders at $0.10, so $9.00. Flixier Starter fits it inside 30 export minutes and 30 subtitle minutes for $19. Sume is $10 cheaper.

A one-person show of 45 Reels at 3 minutes: Flixier Starter's 60 export minutes run out at 20 Reels, so you move to Creator at $39 for unlimited exports. Sume is 45 times $0.90, $40.50. Roughly even again.

What Sume does and does not do here

• Sume has no browser timeline editor and no stock library. The unit is a JSON document and a job.
• Sume captions need audible speech or authored cues. A silent clip returns caption_no_speech with the next action use_overlay_captions.
• Sume does not bill by seat. Several people can submit jobs to the same workspace.
• Sume's caption styles, such as slam, punch and tiktok-green, are named in the request; there is no visual caption editor.

What to do

Take your real month. Count Reels, minutes per Reel and editors. Under about 20 three-minute Reels a month with one human editor, Flixier Starter is a fair buy. With several editors or an unattended pipeline, Sume's per-job line stays flat while seats multiply.

Before you choose, count your own minutes for one month: exported minutes, subtitle minutes and the number of separate videos. Put them in the calculator in this post, price the same month on Sume, and compare the two totals. If the totals are within a few dollars of each other, pick on workflow instead of price.