Meeting transcript budget: a year of weekly calls at $0.01 a minute

Transcribing 15,600 minutes of meetings a year, ten 30-minute meetings a week, costs $156.00 on Sume at $0.01 per audio minute. Even 50 meetings a week comes to $780.00 a year, so transcription is a rounding error in a content budget.

These are Sume billable amounts read on 2026-10-03. Video inspect also bills Modal compute separately, which this table excludes.

The yearly table

Video inspect accepts a source of up to 1,800 seconds, which is why the table uses 30-minute meetings. Split a longer recording before submitting.

What the number leaves out

The transcript price is per audio minute. The docs say each inspect also bills its Modal compute on top, which varies by file, so a quote should add a margin for it rather than assume it is zero.

The bigger cost is what you do with the text. Turning a transcript into five Reels costs far more than the transcript itself, because video generation is billed per output second.

Keeping a year of meetings cheap

Transcribe only the meetings you will mine. A policy of one recorded meeting in four cuts the 10-a-week line to $39.00. Trim long recordings to the useful segment first: trim bills $0.02 per job.

Keep the transcript with the clip it came from so a later question does not trigger a second pass.

Method and assumptions

Every meeting is 30 minutes because inspect accepts a source of up to 1,800 seconds. The optional duration_seconds hint, which sizes the reservation, maxes at 600 and the docs say the capture never exceeds the reservation, so treat the table as a budget at the documented rate, not a guaranteed invoice line. A year is 52 weeks. Minutes a year equal meetings a week times 30 times 52, and the cost is minutes times $0.01.

The table assumes no discounts. If your calls run 45 or 60 minutes, split each into 30-minute pieces and the minute count, and the cost, stay the same, because the price is per audio minute rather than per file.

Compute is the open line. Inspect bills Modal compute separately and the amount depends on the file, so keep a column for it in your own sheet once you have seen a few real invoices. Do not copy a figure from this post.

What Sume does and does not do

The $0.01 per audio minute rate is the documented public rate; confirm it in GET /v1/catalog. Sume does not publish, schedule or measure anything, so the posting side of the plan is yours.

Rerun the arithmetic

The same line items as a short script, so you can change a quantity and see the total. It is plain arithmetic on the rates in this post; it does not call the Sume API.

# Sume billable USD rates, read 2026-10-03. Edit the quantities.
lines = [
    ('Audio minutes, 10 meetings x 30 min x 52 weeks', 15600, 0.01),
]
total = 0.0
for label, qty, unit in lines:
    cost = qty * unit
    total += cost
    print(f"{label:<46}{qty:>8g} x {unit:<10g} = ${cost:,.2f}")
print(f"{'Total':<46}{'':>8}   {'':<10}   ${total:,.2f}")