Is there a Runway Ads API? What Runway's own pages list

No, we could not confirm a product called Runway Ads on Runway's own pages. When we fetched the Runway home page on 2026-10-07 it described three products: Runway Creative, Runway Dev and Runway Robotics, and the text we received did not mention ads or ad variants. The Runway Dev docs do list ad-themed recipes by name, so ad work on Runway looks like something you build on its developer platform, not a separate ads product.

If you saw the name Runway Ads on a news aggregator or a social post, treat it as unverified until it shows up on a runway.com or Runway docs page. This article only states what the vendor pages said when we read them, and then shows how the same job is done on Sume, where ad variants are plain API calls.

What Runway's own pages say

The table below is limited to text that came back from the two vendor pages we fetched. We did not find prices, rate limits or credit costs for the ad recipes on these pages, so none are quoted here.

Why the distinction matters when you plan a test

An ad variant test needs three things from any vendor: a way to submit many jobs, a way to know which job is which, and a price you can add up before you press go. A recipe name in a docs sidebar tells you the vendor is thinking about ads. It does not tell you whether the recipe accepts a batch, returns a stable id for each variant, or reports cost per job.

Before you commit a budget to any tool that markets itself for ads, read the actual recipe page and look for those three properties. If the page is only a nav entry, as it was for the Runway recipes when we read them, you are comparing a label, not a feature.

The same job on Sume

Sume does not ship a product named Ads either. Ad variants are built from parts that are documented. A Format is a saved recipe you call over HTTP. The Format catalog lists ready-made slugs at the reserved sume handle, including sume-product-commercial, sume-close-camera-ugc, sume-before-after and sume-video-hook. You read a slug with GET /v1/formats/sume/{slug} before you call it, and that response carries a description and the input and output kind.

For volume, a bulk run queues 1 to 100 Format runs with a concurrency window of 1 to 16, and you poll one queue URL for counts. For direct control of a single clip, POST /v1/videos takes a model id, a prompt and optional first or last frame images.

• Variants as a list: POST /v1/formats/{handle}/{slug}/bulk-runs with up to 100 items.
• Variants as separate clips: POST /v1/videos once per variant, with an Idempotency-Key per variant.
• Cost per variant: the poll response carries usage.cost for the job.

A first call to test the claim yourself

Run one request and read the poll response, then decide. The call below uses the documented route and a catalog id from the Sume docs. Replace the prompt with your hook.

curl -sS -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/videos \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: hook-a-v1" \
  -d '{"model":"seedance-2","prompt":"Hand holds a travel mug, steam rises, text-free","duration":5,"aspect_ratio":"9:16"}'

What we left out

We did not compare quality, speed or per-clip price against Runway, because the pages we could read did not publish comparable numbers for the ad recipes. If Runway publishes a recipe page with prices later, the right test is the same one: submit ten variants, record the job id and cost of each, and count how many you could map back to a hook without a spreadsheet.