Newsroom: 20 images a day, 440 a month, from $10.89 on Sume

The short answer

A desk that produces 20 illustrations a day over 22 workdays needs 440 images a month. On Sume that costs $10.89 with GPT Image 2.5 low (440 x $0.02475 = $10.89), $44.00 with Nano Banana 2.1 at 1K (440 x $0.10), and $24.48 with GPT Image 2.5 medium at 2K (440 x $0.055625).

At this volume the per-image rate decides the budget, and small differences compound over a year: $44.00 a month is $528.00 a year.

The arithmetic

News illustrations are often small and short-lived, so the lowest tiers can be enough. The table prices a month of 440 images and the annual line is twelve times the month.

Google lists $0.0336 for a 1K image, so 440 would be $14.78 at its standard rate.

How to run it

Track billed cost per desk with the usage cost field returned in each response, and stop the script when a day's total reaches a fixed cap.

State the caption policy for AI illustrations in your newsroom standards. This post covers price, not editorial policy.

Retries and cost per workday

Some images will be rejected by eye, and rejected images are billed like any other, so budget a margin. The bullets add 20 percent to each Sume total in the table above (the totals multiplied by 1.2) and divide by the number of workdays to give a per-workday cost.

Treat the per-workday figure as the number to compare across models, because it does not change when the count changes. Re-read the public catalog before a large run, since prices can change and the table is a snapshot from 2026-10-08.

• GPT Image 2.5 low (1K): $10.89 becomes $13.07 with 20 percent extra images, which is $0.59 per workday (a 22-workday job).
• GPT Image 2.5 medium (2K): $24.48 becomes $29.38 with 20 percent extra images, which is $1.34 per workday (a 22-workday job).
• Nano Banana 2.1 at 0.5K: $33.00 becomes $39.60 with 20 percent extra images, which is $1.80 per workday (a 22-workday job).
• Nano Banana 2.1 at 1K: $44.00 becomes $52.80 with 20 percent extra images, which is $2.40 per workday (a 22-workday job).

What the docs say to check

The endpoint pricing lines are what Sume charges your wallet and already include the Sume margin, so a call costs cost_usd times n. Sume bills image generation all or nothing: a generation that fails or is cancelled is not charged.

On GPT Image 2.5 the quality values are auto, low, medium, high, xhigh and max. If you omit quality the default is high, and auto reserves max, so pin the tier you budgeted for instead of leaving it to the default.

A fixed model id keeps the monthly figure stable. Mixing models by hand each day makes the annual budget a guess.

Every price in this post is a snapshot dated 2026-10-08. The Sume figures come from the public catalog and the Image API docs, the Google figures come from its Gemini API pricing page, and no figure here is a benchmark of quality or speed. Prices and model lists change, so confirm them on the day you spend money.