Remotion Automator $0.01 a render vs Sume Timeline $0.10 a minute

At low volume Sume Timeline is cheaper, because Remotion's Automator license has a $100 monthly minimum and Sume bills $0.10 per output minute with no minimum in the docs. The lines cross at 1,000 one-minute renders a month: both cost $100 there. Above that, Remotion's license line stays flat to 10,000 renders while Sume's keeps climbing, but the license is not the whole Remotion bill.

Remotion's prices are from its home page (read 2026-10-10). Sume's are from Timeline 1.0, which says the public rate is $0.10 per ceil output minute and to confirm the live rate in GET /v1/catalog.

The two price lists

The Remotion page (read 2026-10-10) lists five licenses. Free is $0 for individuals and teams under 3 people, with unlimited commercial use. Creator is $25 per seat per month for manual video creation. Automator is $0.01 per render with a $100 monthly minimum, for video tools and automation. Company (4 or more people) is variable, and Enterprise starts at $500 per month. If you are a small team, the Free row may end the discussion.

Break-even for one-minute renders

Sume bills by ceil output minute, so a render of 60 seconds or less is $0.10 and one of 61 to 120 seconds is $0.20. Remotion's Automator charge is the larger of $100 and $0.01 times your renders. The Remotion column below is the license only.

What each number leaves out

The Remotion license does not include rendering. You still pay for compute, whether that is a server you run or the cloud function you deploy, plus the engineering to write and maintain the React project. The Sume rate is the whole charge for the render: the docs say the job uses worker ffmpeg with no provider inference, and the reserve at submit is ceil(audio.duration_seconds / 60) minutes.

The other direction matters too. Sume's $0.10 buys only assembly of footage you already have, so a Remotion render with animated graphics is not like for like. If your renders are 30-second clips with motion graphics at 20,000 a month, Remotion's flat license plus your compute is likely the lower number. If they are 45-second stitched ads at 300 a month, Sume's $30 is hard to beat.

How to check your own case

Take one real document and call POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan. It returns billable_minutes and estimated_cost_usd_micros and creates no job, so multiply by your monthly count. Then add your own compute and maintenance hours to the Remotion side before you compare.