Music Router at 12.5 cents a song vs ElevenLabs at 15 cents a minute

Sume's Music Router charges a fixed $0.125 for each audio generation, whatever the model or the length you ask for in the prompt. ElevenLabs' API pricing lists Music at $0.15 per minute, and Google's Gemini pricing page lists Lyria 3.5 at $0.08 per song. So a 30-second ElevenLabs track is about $0.075, a 2-minute one is $0.30, and a 4-minute one is $0.60, while Sume stays at $0.125 per generation.

The comparison favors Sume for long tracks and ElevenLabs for short clips, but the engines differ, so listen before you decide.

Per track, by length

ElevenLabs per-minute cost is rate times minutes. Sume's is the fixed price in its Music Router docs. Google's is the list price for the model it runs.

• Sume's Music Router resolves sume/music-auto to Lyria 3.5 today; explicit ids are lyria-3.5 and lyria-3-pro.
• Google's pricing page lists Lyria 3 Clip Preview at $0.04 and Lyria 3 Pro Preview at $0.08.
• ElevenLabs lists Sound Effects at $0.12 per minute; I found no sound-effects endpoint in the Sume docs I read.

Generate a track in four steps

• POST to /v1/music-router/generate with a prompt of 1 to 5,000 characters.
• Put the length in the prompt, such as a 30-second track; duration fields are rejected.
• Leave negative_prompt empty; a non-empty value returns 400 negative_prompt_unsupported.
• Poll /v1/jobs/:id/status, then read the audio artifact from /v1/jobs/:id/result.

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/music-router/generate",
    headers={
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SUME_API_KEY']}",
        "Idempotency-Key": "music-demo-001",
    },
    json={
        "model": "sume/music-auto",
        "prompt": "Warm lo-fi hip hop, 84 BPM. A 30-second track. Instrumental, no vocals.",
    },
    timeout=30,
)
r.raise_for_status()
print(r.json())

How long will the track be

Length is steered by the prompt, and the engine decides the result. Check the output, since a fixed price does not guarantee the exact length you asked for. The job request records the engine that ran in job.request.routed_model.

Reading the table

The break-even against ElevenLabs is at 50 seconds: $0.15 per minute for 50 seconds is $0.125, the same as Sume's fixed price. Anything longer is cheaper on Sume, anything shorter is cheaper on ElevenLabs, if you take the list rates at face value.

Google's $0.08 per song is lower than Sume's $0.125. Sume's catalog lists a provider price for each model for reference, and I did not find it to match Google's page exactly, so read the live catalog before you budget. Whether the premium is worth it depends on how much you value one key and one billing line.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not offer ElevenLabs Music, does not accept a duration field, and does not take a negative prompt. Music 1.0 is retiring gradually, so use the router for new work. The ElevenLabs music page I read describes Music v2 only, so the per-minute API rate is from its pricing page and may not match every model.

Related

See ElevenLabs Music for commercial use and the Music Router model catalog.