Runway vs Luma: monthly credits on each plan vs Sume's balance

Runway and Luma both sell monthly subscriptions that hand you a pool of credits, and the credits are not comparable across the two: Runway's paid plans give 625, 2,250 or 9,500 credits a month, while Luma's give 10,000, 40,000 or 150,000. Sume's video docs describe a different model: each job reserves money from your workspace USD balance at provider list price times 1.25. Neither Runway nor Luma is one of the eight ids in the Sume Video Router catalog today, so this is a comparison of billing models, not a swap.

Both vendor figures below come from each vendor's own pricing page, read on 2026-10-03.

What each pricing page lists

Runway's page lists Free (125 one-time credits), Standard, Pro and Max, and says all paid plans include commercial use and no watermarks. It prices Gen-4.5 video at 60 credits per 5 seconds. Luma's page lists Plus, Pro and Ultra with commercial use on all individual plans, and says video costs vary by model, resolution and feature, up to 280+ credits per second for premium models with audio. Luma's plans carry a dollar price on the page ($30, $90 and $300 a month); this post leaves out Runway's dollar prices because its page shows both a monthly and a yearly figure in a way that is easy to misread.

Turning credits into clips

Only Runway publishes a per-clip credit figure on the page that we can divide by. At 60 credits per 5-second Gen-4.5 clip, Standard's 625 credits cover 10 clips a month (625 / 60 = 10.4, rounded down), Pro's 2,250 cover 37 (37.5) and Max's 9,500 cover 158 (158.3). That assumes you spend nothing on other models, images or speech.

Luma's page gives a range instead of one rate. At the top stated rate of 280 credits per second, Plus's 10,000 credits cover about 35 seconds of video (10,000 / 280 = 35.7). Cheaper models and settings go much further, but the page does not give a single number to divide by, so this post does not invent one.

How Sume bills instead

The Video generation docs state that Sume bills from a workspace USD balance, reserved on submit at provider list price times 1.25, for every model. The Video Router uses the same rule. Cost follows the jobs you submit rather than a plan tier, and the balance has to be funded before you submit.

That makes the better comparison a question about your usage shape. A steady, predictable number of clips each month suits a plan whose credits you will actually spend. Bursty work, such as a campaign week followed by a quiet month, is where per-job billing is easier to reason about, since you are not paying for a pool you may not use. For the per-second arithmetic on one vendor each, see the posts on Runway Gen-4.5 at 12 credits a second and Luma Ray 3.2 clip cost.