Holiday UGC ad with an avatar: 30 seconds costs $5.52, $7.35 or $16.50

A 30-second holiday UGC ad from a Sume avatar costs $5.52 at Standard quality, $7.35 at Plus and $16.50 at Max when no product image is attached. Attach a product image and the same 30 seconds cost $5.82, $7.74 and $17.40.

The rates are per second of finished video: $0.184, $0.245 and $0.55 without a product, and $0.194, $0.258 and $0.58 with one. Creating the avatar itself is a one-time $0.95.

The full rate table for 30 seconds

Avatar video accepts a script or an ordered list of scenes between 4 and 60 seconds, so 30 seconds is a normal length for a UGC-style ad. Each total below is the per-second rate times 30, rounded up to the cent.

Which quality for which job

The docs describe Standard as the fastest execution path, Plus as the balanced default and Max as the highest-quality, slower tier. A reasonable Q4 split is Standard for hook testing and Plus for finals. Reserve Max for the one hero spot that carries paid spend.

For a test of 12 hook variants at 8 seconds each on Standard, the cost is 12 × (8 × $0.184) = 12 × $1.472, rounded per clip to $1.48, so $17.76. Rendering the 2 winners at 30 seconds on Plus costs 2 × $7.35 = $14.70. The whole test is $32.46.

Write the request

The canonical route is POST /v1/avatar-1.0/talking-video. Send the avatar handle, the script, a vertical ratio and the quality. Captions can be burned in as part of the same job through the captions object, and the docs state that inline captions do not create a separate caption job; they are an add-on inside the avatar-video estimate, so check the preview for the exact total.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/avatar-1.0/talking-video \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: holiday-ugc-001" \
  -d '{
    "avatar_handle": "YOUR_AVATAR_HANDLE",
    "script": "I gave my sister this candle last year and she still talks about it. This year it ships free until the 18th.",
    "aspect_ratio": "9:16",
    "quality": "standard",
    "captions": { "enabled": true, "style": "slam", "language": "auto" }
  }'

Limits that change the budget

Resolution is 720p at this time. Scripts that estimate longer than 60 seconds are refused, so split a long ad into two jobs and join them later. One resolved avatar and one shared scene serve each final video, so a mid-video change of location needs separate jobs.