What is a Q4 video budget for a one-person shop, week by week?

A one-person shop can run a weekly video from Halloween to New Year for about $9.675 of generation on Sume. The plan below has ten weeks and one deliverable each, priced at the public rates read on 2026-10-07: Omni 720p at $0.125 a second, Ideogram 4.5 at $0.075 (medium) or $0.275 (high) an image, TTS at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters, music at $0.125, a render at $0.10 a minute and captions at $0.20.

The point is the shape, not the total. Most weeks are one or two cheap jobs, and a few weeks have the bigger ad. Reuse is what keeps the total low: three weeks only re-caption something you already made.

The calendar

Halloween is Saturday, October 31. Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26, Black Friday is November 27, Small Business Saturday is November 28 and Cyber Monday is November 30. Christmas is Friday, December 25, and New Year's Eve is Thursday, December 31. The weeks start on a Monday, and a post for a date is made the week before.

Make the Black Friday teaser first, and the others will reuse its pieces. Everything is a generated file with an id, so keep a list of what you made, and what each cost, in one sheet.

The weekly plan

Where the money goes

The largest single items are the Black Friday ad ($2.305) and the six high-quality gift guide covers ($1.65). If you take the covers at medium quality instead, that line drops to $0.45. If you take the 15-second ad at 360p, it drops by more than a dollar, but check that the picture is sharp enough on a phone before you commit.

The weeks that cost one caption job ($0.20) are the ones where the video already exists. A discount code that changes, an order-by date that moves, or a new offer is a text change, and text changes are cheap. Keep your renders and the clip files, and you re-caption.

Remember what is not in the plan: your own time, the price of the ads you buy, and any retakes. Add a retake budget of about 30 percent of the total, because the first pass of a generated clip is not always right.

Three ways to cut it

First, lower the resolution where it does not show. A 720p clip is $0.125 a second and a 360p clip is $0.0375, a third of the price, which is fine for a small story. Second, take images at low quality ($0.0375) for drafts and only run the final at medium or high. Third, reuse: a new offer on the same render is one caption job.

Where not to cut: the text. Dates, prices and the order-by deadline are the parts a buyer acts on, and they belong in caption cues you wrote, which are checked by you rather than generated.

If the budget is far smaller than this, drop weeks 4 and 7, which are the gift guide, and use one cover image and one narration for the whole month.

How to run it

On Sunday, make the next week's job in one sitting: generate, check, caption and store. Each job is async, so submit with an Idempotency-Key, poll GET /v1/jobs/:id/status and read /result. A retry with the same key does not create a second paid job.

Check the account balance before a heavy week (the Black Friday ad and the gift guide), since a request with too little balance is refused. At the end of December, add up what each week cost against this plan and keep the sheet, so next year's plan starts from real numbers.

• Weeks 1, 2 and 10 are small, and weeks 3 to 5 are the busy ones.
• Retakes are not in the total: add a margin of about 30 percent.
• Reuse is the lever: a re-caption of a finished render is $0.20.