Sume timeline bills whole minutes: a 61-second Reel costs twice a 60

The Sume Timeline 1.0 render bills $0.10 per output minute, rounded up, so a 60-second Reel costs $0.10 and a 61-second Reel costs $0.20. The same rule puts 180 seconds at $0.30 and 181 seconds at $0.40. When a Reel sits a second or two past a minute edge, trimming that second halves the render fee for that Reel.

The edges line up with how Instagram describes Reels. The Reels guide (read 2026-10-05) sorts videos into 3 to 15 seconds, 15 to 60 seconds, and 60 seconds to 3 minutes, so the 60-second and 180-second marks are natural cut points, and they are also the billing edges.

The rule in the docs

The Timeline 1.0 documentation says the public rate is $0.10 per ceil(output minute), and tells you to confirm the live rate in GET /v1/catalog. The reserve is ceil(audio.duration_seconds / 60) minutes. The job uses no provider inference, only worker ffmpeg, and the result reports billable_minutes next to duration_seconds.

The default output is a 1080 x 1920 MP4, which is the vertical shape of a Reel. If you leave out output.fps, the render uses the rate of the sources.

Why it is worth a trim

A render fee of $0.10 is small by itself. At 100 Reels a month, though, a habit of landing 3 seconds past a minute edge costs $10.00 more than landing on it (100 x $0.10). It is the cheapest saving in the pipeline, because the fix is one trimmed breath or a slightly tighter ending, not a change of model.

The saving is real only when the extra second is padding. If it carries the call to action, keep it and pay the minute. The point is to decide on purpose, not to find out from the invoice.

• Check the cut length before you submit. If it is 60.4 seconds, the fee is for two minutes.
• Trim the last beat first. A held final frame is the usual place to find a spare second.
• For a 180-second Reel, leave a margin under the line. Content that must stay under 3 minutes for Instagram's guide range also stays under the third billable minute.
• Read billable_minutes in the result to confirm what you were charged.

A small check you can run

Before a render, take the planned length in seconds and divide by 60. Round up. Multiply by $0.10. If the answer changes when you subtract two seconds, look at the cut again. For example, 121 seconds gives 3 minutes, and 119 seconds gives 2.

The render fee is separate from generation. It does not include the video clips, the music or the captions, which are priced on their own jobs.

One more case: a Reel that is 59.9 seconds bills one minute, and one that is exactly 60.0 seconds also bills one minute, so you do not need to cut under 60, only to the edge.