Price a Reel or Short before you render it with Timeline plan

Both Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts now run to three minutes, and a render bills by the started minute, so length is the cost lever. Sume's Timeline has an unbilled plan call that returns the billable minutes and an estimated cost for a program before you submit it. Run it first and you know what a 90-second Reel will cost.

The three-minute limits are from YouTube Shorts (read 2026-10-03) and Record a reel on Instagram (read 2026-10-03). The second page adds that Reels over 3 minutes will not be recommended to new audiences, so 180 seconds is also a reach ceiling, not only a length limit.

What a plan returns

Per the Timeline docs, POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan returns duration_seconds, segment_count, billable_minutes, estimated_cost_usd_micros and a filtergraph_summary. It creates no job, reserves no credits and downloads no media, and it needs no Idempotency-Key. The public rate is $0.10 per ceil of the output minute.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/plan \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "audio": { "mode": "silence", "duration_seconds": 90 },
    "video": [{
      "source_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/clip.mp4",
      "start": 0,
      "duration": 90
    }]
  }'

Where the minute boundaries fall

The ceiling rounds up, so one extra second can add a full minute.

What the plan cannot see

The docs say a plan cannot predict warnings about short sources being padded or looped, so it checks the shape and cost of the program, not the quality of the result. It also costs nothing, so there is no reason to skip it in a script that renders in volume. Fail the script if billable_minutes is higher than you budgeted.

Use it as a budget gate

In a script, call plan for every program, compare billable_minutes with what you budgeted, and refuse to render when it is higher. The check costs nothing, and it catches the common mistake of a voice-over that runs two seconds past a minute boundary. Trimming the script by two seconds saves a whole minute of billing.