Narration cost per minute at 900 characters a minute: Flash vs Sume

Per-minute cost depends on your own speech rate

Narration is priced per character, not per minute, so a per-minute figure needs a characters-per-minute assumption. This post assumes 900 characters per minute as a round planning number; it is an assumption, not a measured property of any model. Measure yours by dividing your script's character count by the finished audio length.

At 900 characters a minute, Sume TTS costs 900 x 0.00475 = 4.275 cents per narrated minute before per-job rounding. Sume does not list MAI-Voice-2.1, MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash or MAI-Transcribe-2 in its catalogs, so this is a price comparison, not a statement that you can call Microsoft's models through Sume.

Cost per minute and for a 10-minute script

Sume TTS list price is 38 micro-dollars (0.0038 cents) per character; the billable price is list x 1.25, rounded up to whole cents per job. That is 0.00475 cents per character before rounding, so a 20,000-character request is 20,000 x 0.00475 = 95 cents.

Vendor prices come from a third-party release tracker that lists them, not from a Microsoft price page, so confirm them on Microsoft's own pricing before you commit.

Sensitivity to the assumption

If your script runs faster or slower, scale linearly. At 1,200 characters a minute Sume's per-minute cost is 1,200 x 0.00475 = 5.7 cents; at 750 it is 3.5625 cents. The ranking between vendors does not change, because every price is linear in characters.

• Sume per minute = characters per minute x 0.00475 cents.
• Vendor per minute = characters per minute x rate / 1,000,000.

What else a narrated minute costs on Sume

Narration is rarely the whole bill. A finished minute of video on Sume adds a Timeline render at $0.10 per output minute (Timeline 1.0) and, if you want burned-in captions, $0.20 per job for clips up to 60 seconds (Video captions).

So one captioned narrated minute is about $0.05 voice + $0.10 render + $0.20 captions = $0.35, before footage and music. Music 1.0 adds a fixed $0.125 per generation (Music 1.0).

How to measure your own rate

Take a finished narration you like, count the characters in the script including spaces, and divide by the audio length in minutes. Do this on three different scripts, because dense technical copy and conversational copy differ a lot. Use the lowest and highest results as your planning range instead of one average.

Character count is also the only number you control before generation, so put it in your editing tool. A script editor that shows a live count lets you hit a target length without paying for exploratory takes.

Rounding and small jobs

Sume rounds each job up to whole cents, so very short lines are billed at the one-cent floor. A 100-character line is 100 x 0.00475 = 0.475 cents and bills 1 cent, which is more than double its pure per-character cost. Ten such lines as ten jobs cost 10 cents; as one 1,000-character job they cost 4.75 cents, rounded up to 5. If you need separate clips, you can generate one longer take and slice it with Timeline audio at $0.01 per job.