Ideogram 4.5 poster test: 120 concepts, 20 reruns, 5 finals for $7.38

Staging an Ideogram 4.5 poster test costs $7.38 on Sume: 120 concepts at low quality ($4.50), the best 20 rerun at medium ($1.50), and 5 finals at high ($1.38). Rendering all 120 at high quality would cost $33.00, so the staged route is 22% of the cost. Add the 5.5% platform fee from Sume's pricing policy and the staged total is $7.78.

Ideogram 4.5's price depends only on the quality setting, not on the image size. The repo's list is $0.03, $0.06 and $0.22 per image at low, medium and high, and Sume bills those times 1.25, which gives $0.0375, $0.075 and $0.275.

The stages

The arithmetic

120 x $0.0375 = $4.50. 20 x $0.075 = $1.50. 5 x $0.275 = $1.38. The sum is $7.38. The all-high route is 120 x $0.275 = $33.00. High costs 3.67 times medium and 7.33 times low, which is the whole case for staging: poster text and layout usually fail or pass at low quality, so you pay the high rate only for survivors.

A cheaper explore stage exists. The repo also prices a very_low tier at $0.008 list ($0.01 on Sume), but its pricing note labels that tier as an edit price, so we do not build a text-to-image plan on it.

Steps

• Send quality: "low" in the first batch, up to 4 images per request with num_images.
• Pick winners by whether the headline text and layout rendered the way the brief asked.
• Rerun winners with the same prompt at quality: "medium".
• Send the final 5 at quality: "high". Quality, not size, sets the price.

What if your keep rate is different

The plan above assumes a one-in-six keep rate at the first gate (20 of 120) and one in four at the second (5 of 20). Change those and the total moves in a predictable way. Keep 30 instead of 20 and the middle stage becomes 30 x $0.075 = $2.25, taking the total to $8.13. Keep 10 finals instead of 5 and the last stage is 10 x $0.275 = $2.75, so the total is $8.75 before the platform fee.

The break-even against the all-high route is generous. You could render all 120 at low ($4.50), all 120 again at medium ($9.00) and still have $19.50 of the $33.00 left for finals, which buys 70 high-quality images.

Remember that each stage is a fresh generation: a medium rerun is a new image from the same prompt, not an upscale of the low one. Budget it as a full image.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not guarantee that a low-quality render predicts the high-quality layout; the model may re-compose the image at a higher setting, so treat the staged plan as a filter and not a preview. If you omit quality, the default is medium. Rates read from the repo on 2026-10-08.