Runway credit table vs Sume plan call: know the price first

You can know the price of a Sume timeline render before you pay, because POST /v1/timeline-1.0/plan is unbilled and returns the cost estimate. Runway tells you the price from a table instead: its pricing page lists credits for each video model, such as Gen-4.5 at 60 credits for 5 seconds and Aleph 2.0 at 140 credits for 5 seconds, and you convert credits to dollars yourself using your plan.

Both are honest ways to quote a price. They differ in when you learn the number and in what unit.

Turning credits into dollars

On Runway Standard, the page shows $12 a month billed annually, with 625 credits a month, so one credit is 12 / 625 = $0.0192. Gen-4.5 at 60 credits is 60 x 0.0192 = $1.152 for 5 seconds, and Seedance 2.0 Pro at 160 credits is about $3.07 for 4 seconds. At the listed $15 monthly price, a credit is $0.024 and the 60-credit clip is $1.44. Sume does not list Gen-4.5 or Aleph, so there is no like-for-like Sume price for those two.

The Seedance rows are the one overlap. Runway offers Seedance 2.0 Pro and Fast and Sume lists the seedance-2 family, but model access, resolution and any provider mark-up differ, so compare prices from each catalog on the day you buy.

How Sume answers the same question

For video generation Sume reserves the provider list price multiplied by 1.25 at submit, and the reserve becomes the charge when the job succeeds. For timeline assembly, call the plan endpoint first. It checks the schema and the Sume-hosted URLs, compiles the document and returns duration_seconds, segment_count, billable_minutes and estimated_cost_usd_micros. It creates no job, reserves nothing and needs no Idempotency-Key.

A plan cannot predict warnings from short sources being padded or looped. Treat it as the price and shape of the render, not a test of the media.

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/intro.mp4","start":0,"duration":90}]}'

Takeaway

If you budget in dollars per finished minute, ask each vendor for a quote path that costs nothing. Runway gives one in a table; Sume gives one for assembly in an endpoint. For the generation step, put your own number on it with the catalog before you run a batch.