Hume plan ladder: effective cost per 1,000 characters vs Sume

If you use every included character, Hume's cheapest effective rate is $0.05 per 1,000 characters on the Business plan (and on the promotional Creator price), and Sume TTS 1.0 at a flat $0.0475 per 1,000 is lower than every Hume plan on the page. That is the headline of the plan ladder read on 2026-10-05. The catch is that plans are a different shape from pay-per-use: a plan is cheap per character only if you consume what it includes.

What each Hume plan costs per character

Hume's page lists plan prices of Free at $0, Starter at $3, Creator at $7 (a promotional price, with $14 regular), Pro at $70, Scale at $200 and Business at $500. The included characters are 10K, 30K, 140K, 1M, 3.3M and 10M in that order. Dividing price by included characters gives the effective rate when the allowance is used completely. The last column is what Sume TTS 1.0 would bill for the same character count at $0.0475 per 1,000.

Reading the table

Creator at the promotional $7 is the closest call: $7 against $6.65 on Sume for 140,000 characters, a gap of 35 cents. At the regular $14 the gap is $7.35. Business is $25 above Sume at full use ($500 against $475). Scale is $43.25 above ($200 against $156.75), and Pro is $22.50 above ($70 against $47.50).

These comparisons are cost only. Hume's plans bundle other products and features that this post does not price, and Sume's TTS 1.0 is billed per request with a cap of 20,000 characters each.

The part that depends on your usage

A plan is a commitment, and the effective rate gets worse the less of it you use. Take Pro: $70 for 1M characters is $0.07 per 1K at full use, but at 500,000 characters used it is $0.14 per 1K, while Sume bills $23.75 for the same 500,000. Pay-per-use has no unused allowance, so the Sume bill is a straight line through zero.

Hume also lists a per-1K character rate by plan, which is what applies beyond the allowance as the page presents it: $0.15 on Free, Starter and Creator, $0.12 on Pro, $0.10 on Scale and $0.05 on Business. On every plan except Business the listed per-1K rate is above Sume's $0.0475.

• Under 30,000 characters a month, Sume costs $1.425 or less.
• Between plan allowances, the unused portion is what you pay Hume for and not Sume.
• Beyond the allowance, on any plan other than Business, Hume's listed per-1K rate is above $0.0475.

How Sume prices it

Sume TTS 1.0 is the provider list rate of $0.038 per 1,000 characters times 1.25, which is $0.0475, with no plan fee for the TTS itself and a 20,000-character maximum per request. Sume's own plans (Pro at $40, Startup at $120 and Scale at $400 per month on the pricing page) are about concurrency and the product, and usage is billed at each model's published USD rate from one shared balance, per the credits docs.

If your monthly volume is near a plan boundary, run the number both ways. The rate to compute against is on the API pricing page.

Quick rule

Pick a plan when you reliably use 90 percent or more of its characters and you value what else it includes. Pick pay-per-use when volume swings or you are still prototyping. Check Hume's current terms on its pricing page, since the Creator price is flagged there as a promotion.