PiAPI's $0.50 start credit and resetting bonus vs a Sume USD balance

PiAPI's pricing page (read 2026-10-11) lists four plans, a $0.50 starting credit for new accounts, and bonus credits on two plans that it says reset each cycle. Sume works differently: you pay a USD balance at each model's published rate, and the plan sets concurrency and access rather than a credit bundle.

If you are comparing a pay-as-you-go media API that sells credit plans against one that bills dollars, the difference shows up in three places: what a free start gives you, what a monthly fee buys, and how many jobs can run at once.

What the PiAPI page lists

The PiAPI pricing page (read 2026-10-11) shows Free at $0 a month, Creator at $15, Pro at $60 and Enterprise at $100. Creator reads "Receive $10 bonus credits · resets each cycle" and Pro reads "Receive $60 bonus credits · resets each cycle". Free and Enterprise say they include no free credits in the subscription plan. New accounts start with $0.50 in free credits. Free has limited task processing speed, Creator and above have unlimited task processing speed, and Enterprise allows up to 100 sub-accounts.

The page says API usage is pay-as-you-go from your credit balance and that each model has its own rate. It does not list per-model video prices on that page; you open each API to see them.

What the Sume docs say

Sume's billing page says you examine the plan and the available balance in the dashboard and can buy credits there for Developer API usage. A top-up is a dashboard operation: the public API has GET /v1/balance and GET /v1/usage, but no endpoint that creates a top-up.

At submit time Sume reserves the estimated amount, captures it on success, and releases or refunds it on failure or on cancellation before capture (see Generation admission). If the balance cannot cover the reservation, the submit fails with 402 insufficient_credits before any provider work starts. On the plan side, the pricing page in the repo lists Free at $0 (image generation, one concurrent job), Pro at $40 a month with video generation and API + CLI + MCP access and 4 concurrent jobs, Startup at $120 with 8, and Scale at $400 with 20.

Side by side

How to read "resets each cycle"

The wording on PiAPI's page does not say what happens to bonus credits you do not spend. It could mean they expire and are replaced, or that the balance is topped up to the bonus amount. The page I read does not settle it, so ask PiAPI before you plan a month around it. For Pro, the arithmetic is at least clear: a $60 fee comes with a $60 bonus, so the listed fee and the bonus are equal.

Sume avoids that question by not selling a bonus bundle in the docs: the money you add is a USD balance, and each job shows a reserve and a captured amount in the usage ledger.

When each fits

Pick PiAPI's model if you want a small monthly fee that comes back as credit and you are comfortable reading each model's rate on its own page. Pick Sume if you want one /v1/videos route, a ledger in dollars, and a queue that accepts more jobs than the plan runs at once: on Free that is 1 running and 5 queued, so 6 accepted, and on Pro 4 running and 20 queued, so 24.