New avatar per campaign or reuse one: 12 campaigns, $70.20 vs $59.75

Reusing one Sume avatar across 12 campaigns of 20 seconds at Plus costs $59.75; creating a fresh avatar for each campaign costs $70.20. The difference is eleven extra creation fees of $0.95, or $10.45.

The arithmetic

Avatar creation is a flat $0.95 per avatar. A 20-second Plus clip is 20 x $0.245 = $4.90 without a product image. Pricing as of 2026-10-08.

What the docs say about reuse

Avatar creation is job-backed. When the job completes, the avatar becomes a reusable resource in your workspace, and you refer to it by avatar_handle on every talking-video request. The docs recommend a stable handle so an app or agent has a consistent name for the avatar. Sume normalizes the handle and stores it without a leading @.

Creation fees only matter when you actually need different faces. For 12 campaigns that all use the same host, the extra spend is pure overhead. For 12 campaigns that need 12 distinct presenters, the creation fee is a small share of each total: $0.95 of $5.85, about 16 percent.

When a new avatar is the right call

Create a new avatar when the campaign needs a different person: a different audience, language market or product line where one face would confuse viewers. Create from a prompt or from props (ethnicity, sex, age) when you do not want a real person involved, or from a reference photo when you hold the rights to that face.

Remember that the creation fee is not a per-video cost. A host you will use for 100 videos pays $0.95 once.

• Same host, same look: reuse the handle.
• Different persona per market: create one avatar per market.
• Testing faces: budget $0.95 per candidate before any video spend.

Practical notes

Reusable avatars. An avatar is created once, for a flat $0.95, and then referenced by its avatar_handle on every later request. Sume normalizes a leading @ away and stores the handle without it. Treat the handle as a stable identifier in your own system, and keep one record per handle noting who the avatar represents and what it may be used for.

Idempotency. The docs examples send an Idempotency-Key header on every create call. Use one key per intended job and reuse it only when you retry the same request. A network timeout followed by a fresh submit with a new key is the one path that can create, and bill, a second job. Keep keys human-readable, such as the campaign and scene, so a support lookup is easy.

Quality tiers. quality accepts standard, plus and max. Plus is the default when you omit it. Standard is the fastest Sume execution path, and Max is the highest quality tier with slower turnaround. Because the three differ in both price and speed, decide the tier per stage of your workflow: a quick pass to confirm wording, then a final render once the script is settled.