Mini-course launch: 8 avatar lesson intros by tier, $33 to $91

An eight-lesson mini-course with a 20-second avatar intro per lesson, burned-in captions, a medium-quality thumbnail per lesson, three music beds and one avatar costs $32.81 on Standard, $42.57 on Plus and $91.37 on Max, before retries. Nearly all of the spread is the avatar tier: the same extras add up to $3.37 in every column.

Every figure is a Sume list-rate estimate from the pricing package, not a quote for your request. Price your own script lengths before you buy.

What goes into the plan?

Each lesson gets a 20-second talking intro from one reusable avatar (the avatar costs $0.95 once). Each intro gets captions at the flat $0.20 per video, which covers videos up to 60 seconds. Each lesson gets one medium-quality GPT Image 2.5 thumbnail at $0.055625. Three Lyria 3.5 music beds at $0.125 each are shared across the course. The lesson bodies themselves are recorded elsewhere and cost nothing here.

Avatar videos take 4 to 60 seconds, and the per-second rate depends on the quality tier you pick on the request. The rates in the table are the no-product rates; adding a product image raises them.

Where should the tier money go?

Extras are the same in every column, so the decision is about the intro only. A cheap check: generate lesson one on Standard and on Max, compare them side by side, and choose per lesson rather than for the whole course. Mixing five Standard intros with three Max intros costs $54.77 under the same extras.

Put the Max intros where viewers decide whether to stay: the course trailer and lesson one. Later lessons are watched by people who already enrolled.

What to hold back for retries

Scripts get rewritten. A rule of thumb that fits any tier: set aside one extra intro per four lessons. For eight lessons that is two more 20-second intros, $7.36 on Standard or $22.00 on Max. Captions are cheap to rerun at $0.20, so recaptioning is not what drives the reserve; regenerating the avatar clip is.

Top up the wallet for the full plan plus the retry reserve before you start. An avatar job that would push the balance below its hold is refused with a 402 insufficient_credits, as the generation admission page describes.

What the plan leaves out

The table prices only what Sume generates. It does not include recording the lesson bodies, hosting, or any editing you do yourself. It also does not include a joined trailer. If you stitch the intro and the lesson into one file with a Timeline render, add $0.10 per output minute, rounded up per the Timeline docs, so eight lessons each rendered to an output under a minute add $0.80.

Thumbnails are priced at medium quality. A high-quality image costs $0.2225, so upgrading all eight adds $1.33. Few viewers will notice that difference on a small thumbnail, but a course cover shown large might justify it for one image.

• Intro length matters most: every extra 5 seconds on Standard adds $0.92 per lesson, $7.36 across eight lessons.
• The avatar creation fee of $0.95 is paid once; reuse the avatar for every lesson.
• Captions are priced per video, not per second, up to 60 seconds.