How much to top up a Sume wallet: what $10 and $1,000 buy

Size a Sume top-up as your expected spend until the next top-up plus the largest single hold you will place, then round up inside the $10 to $1,000 range that the pricing FAQ gives for on-demand purchases. A $10 purchase buys about 40 seconds of Avatar Plus video; $1,000 buys about 4,081 seconds.

Top-ups are made in the dashboard. The Billing and credits page says the public API exposes balance and usage reads, not a top-up endpoint, so a person has to be in the loop.

What does a purchase buy?

Divide the purchase by the published rates from the API pricing page. Whole units only; the rates are read 2026-10-03.

Why add the largest hold?

A submit reserves its estimate first. The admission docs say a request fails with 402 insufficient_credits before provider work starts when Sume cannot reserve that cost. So a wallet of $20 with a spend plan of $15 can still refuse a single job whose reserve is higher than the $20 on hand, such as a long avatar clip: 120 seconds of Avatar Plus reserves $29.40.

Every job in a batch holds its estimate until it settles, so a wave of 24 queued jobs holds 24 estimates at once. Work out the wave, not the average. Largest hold one Sume call can place lists the per-endpoint ceilings.

What is a simple sizing rule?

Take the burn per day from your own snapshots (see forecasting days of balance left), multiply by the days until someone can next top up, and add the largest hold in your next batch. A team that spends $25 a day, can top up every Monday and runs one batch with a $30 maximum hold needs about 7 x $25 + $30 = $205 on hand, so a $250 purchase fits; a $1,000 purchase is idle money for most of a month.

What about budgeting in another currency?

The balance response carries a currency field, and the source defaults it to USD; the docs call the balance USD-denominated. The pages cited here do not describe conversion, so treat the card issuer's rate on the day of purchase as the rate and keep a margin in your budget for movement. Do not budget from a rate you looked up earlier in the month.

What should you not rely on?

Do not assume the purchase range is permanent; it comes from the public FAQ as of the read date. If you need more than $1,000 at a time, or invoice terms, the Enterprise route on the pricing page is the path: it lists custom volume pricing and invoice or PO billing, with a contact address rather than a price.