SaaS release-day product tour in 4 languages: $1.40

A SaaS marketer can ship a 55-second release tour in four languages for $1.40 on Sume: $0.35 per language, made of a voiceover ($0.05), a timeline render ($0.10) and burned captions ($0.20). Run monthly, that is $16.80 a year. Q4 is when many teams cluster releases before a freeze, so a repeatable per-language cost is the thing to put in a launch plan.

The recipe takes the screen recording you already have, replaces its audio with a generated voiceover, and burns captions in each language. It does not translate your script; bring reviewed translations, because product terms and UI labels are exactly what a machine translation changes.

Per-language steps

Voiceover: a 900-character script is $0.04275 and bills as $0.05. Pass the language field and a voice that speaks that language. Render: import the recording, then run a timeline render with the voiceover as the audio and the recording as one video slot. Under a minute, the render is $0.10. Captions: the standalone caption job is $0.20 for videos up to 60 seconds, which is why the tour is 55 seconds and not 90.

Timing is the practical problem. A translated script is rarely the same length as the English one, so a German or Finnish voiceover may run past the recording. Set the render's audio duration to the actual voiceover length, use the recording's start and duration fields to hold or trim scenes, and check the plan endpoint first: it is unbilled and returns the billable minutes and estimated cost.

What can push the number up

A tour that runs 61 seconds is billed as two render minutes and falls outside the caption job's 60-second limit, so the cheapest cut is also the one that fits both limits. Re-recording the screen capture is not a Sume cost, but the usual trigger is a UI change after the recording, so freeze the interface before you record.

Reviewing four languages is the real expense. Have a native speaker watch each output once with the sound on, looking at line breaks in the captions as well as the translation. Because captions are burned into pixels, a typo found after publishing means another $0.20 caption job plus a re-upload, so correct the script before the caption step.

Keep the clean render of each language. If only the caption text changes, you pay $0.20 for a new caption job and skip the render and voiceover.