Monthly content calendar budget: 12 Reels, 4 Shorts, 8 carousels

A monthly calendar of 12 Reels, 4 60-second Shorts and 8 carousels costs about $83.28 at the lean tier, $125.43 at the standard tier and $371.51 at the premium tier on Sume, before retakes. The choice of video model is nearly the whole difference: the finishing costs, which are narration, captions, render and music, come to $7.23 a month in every tier.

The calendar is our planning assumption, not a benchmark: it equals three Reels, one Short and two carousels a week over four weeks, and you can scale any line. All rates are Sume billable amounts, which are provider list times 1.25, read on 2026-10-03. Narration assumes 15 characters per second, which is an assumption to replace with your own.

The three tiers

Each tier picks a video model and an image model. Lean uses Wan 3.0 at 720p, which bills $0.125 per second, with GPT Image 2.5 at medium quality for square (1:1) carousel slides. Standard uses Seedance 2.0 Mini at 720p, $0.189 per second, with Ideogram 4.5 medium. Premium uses Seedance 2.5 at 720p, $0.5778 per second, with Ideogram 4.5 high.

Every Reel is 30 seconds of generated video and every Short is 60 seconds. Wan 3.0 and Seedance 2.5 accept up to 30 seconds per clip; the Seedance 2.0 Mini column assumes you stay inside that model's 15-second cap, so a Reel is two clips and a Short is four. Video is billed per output second, so the clip count does not change the price. Carousel slides are 8 per post.

Finishing is the same in every tier

A Reel needs one caption job ($0.20), one rendered Timeline minute ($0.10, because Timeline rounds up to the next minute) and, in this plan, one Music Router track ($0.125). A 60-second Short needs the same plus longer narration. These are the fixed costs of having a finished file.

Over a month of 16 videos that is $7.23. If you reuse one music track across the month, subtract 15 tracks, or $1.88.

What moves the number

Two choices change the month by more than a few dollars. The first is the video model, as the table shows. The second is retake rate, because a generated clip that misses costs its full price again. The last column adds half of the whole month as a retake allowance; it is a crude bound, since retakes would not re-bill every caption job.

A third lever is cadence. Doubling the number of Reels doubles the Reel column and nothing else.

What Sume does and does not do

Sume produces the files and prices each job. It does not hold a content calendar or publish posts for you, so the schedule lives in your own tool. Rates for each tier are available from GET /v1/catalog; confirm them before you commit a client budget.

• Video clips: per output second, by model and resolution.
• Image slides: per image, by model and quality.
• Captions, Timeline, music, narration: fixed or per-minute as listed above.

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 = [
    ('Reel clip seconds (Wan 720p), 12 x 30', 360, 0.125),
    ('Short clip seconds (Wan 720p), 4 x 60', 240, 0.125),
    ('Carousel slides (GPT Image 2.5 medium)', 64, 0.0165),
    ('Narration characters', 9000, 0.0000475),
    ('Caption jobs', 16, 0.20),
    ('Timeline minutes', 16, 0.10),
    ('Music tracks', 16, 0.125),
]
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}")