One AI image a day for 365 days: $9.03 to $36.50 on Sume

One image a day for 365 days costs $9.03 on GPT Image 2.5 at low quality, $15.97 on Seedream 5 Lite, $27.38 on Nano Banana 2.1 at 0.5K, and $36.50 at 1K, using Sume's per-image prices as of 2026-10-09. The monthly average runs from about 75 cents to about $3.04.

A daily image suits a blog header, a calendar, a daily quote card or a thumbnail for a daily show. Because the volume is one call a day, the real cost question is not speed but how much you pay for a year of consistency.

A year, row by row

Each total is 365 times the per-image price. The last column divides by 12 for a monthly figure. Prices are Sume's billed amounts, which are provider list price multiplied by 1.25, and a failed generation is not billed.

What a small balance needs

Sume checks your balance at submit time and rounds the hold up to whole cents, so a daily job on GPT Image 2.5 low holds 3 cents and one on Nano Banana 2.1 at 1K holds 10 cents. You do not need the year in the wallet on day one. A $10 top-up covers 404 low-quality GPT Image 2.5 images, which is more than a year.

If you want a cheap safety net for a scheduled job, top up so that the balance stays above a month of use. A job that runs out of balance fails at submit instead of producing a partial image.

Which row for which job

Pick the row by what the picture must do. For a small thumbnail that is viewed at a few hundred pixels, the 1K rows are more than enough, and the cheapest rows cost under 10 cents a week. For a header that will be shown large, the extra cost of 2K or 4K on Nano Banana 2.1 is $0.15 or $0.20 per image, which is $54.75 or $73.00 a year.

Mixing rows is also fine. You can run the daily image on a cheap row and spend more only on the days that matter, such as a launch day or a holiday.

Keep the daily prompt stable

For a daily series, fix the style words and vary only the subject. Put the date in the job metadata so that you can match each result to its day later. Sume stores metadata on the job and does not send it to the provider.

Check the schedule once with a seven-day trial before you commit to a year. Seven images on Nano Banana 2.1 at 1K cost $0.70, and the same seven on GPT Image 2.5 at low quality cost $0.17325. Look at all seven side by side. If the set looks uneven, change the prompt before you spend the first $9.

The Image API docs cover metadata, n and the response shape. Read usage.cost on each response if you want to log the billed amount per day.