Schedule a weekly AI video: Sume Scheduled, Hermes cron or API

For a video that must appear every Monday with the same brief, use Sume's own schedule: it is set up in the dashboard with a cron expression and a time zone, and Sume starts the run. For a video whose input changes every week, keep the clock outside Sume, in Hermes cron or plain cron, and call a Format with that week's data.

The dividing line is who owns the clock and who owns the input. Sume's docs say a schedule is for work that nothing triggers except time; if your own system supplies data, they point you to the Format API.

What does each option do?

The Sume and Hermes columns come from their own docs pages; the third option is ordinary scheduling that you run yourself.

What are the limits of a Sume schedule?

From the Scheduled docs, the things to plan around:

• The spend cap defaults to $1.00 per run when unset, and a per-run override can lower it but never raise it.
• A schedule run is not a generation job and is read at /v1/action-runs/{id}, not /v1/jobs/{id}.
• The overlap rule is on_active_run with skip or reject.
• The API can list schedules, read them, start runs and monitor them. It cannot create, edit or delete one.
• Schedules are not exposed over Sume's MCP or CLI, and there is no events endpoint.

What does a Format call add?

A Format run takes your input per call, accepts output_schema and a per-run generation_spend_cap_usd up to $500, supports communication.webhook_url, and can be started by any scheduler. That is why an external clock fits changing data. The run is the same engine and the same kind of receipt; what changes is that you carry the clock yourself, so you must also carry duplicate protection. A date-based key does that:

#!/bin/sh
# weekly.sh - run from cron: 0 9 * * 1 /opt/sume/weekly.sh
set -eu
WEEK=$(date +%G-W%V)
curl -sS -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/formats/myteam/weekly-teaser/runs \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: weekly-teaser-$WEEK" \
  -d '{"instruction":"Make the weekly teaser from the input.",
       "input":{"headline":"Autumn range"},
       "generation_spend_cap_usd":20,
       "on_active_run":"skip"}'

Where does Hermes cron fit?

Hermes adds a language model between the clock and the API call. Its cron page describes schedules as intervals, cron expressions or ISO timestamps, every job in a fresh session, and a reply of [SILENT] to suppress delivery. Use it when the weekly job needs judgment, such as picking this week's product from a feed and writing the brief, before calling the Format. Use plain cron when the request body is mechanical, since a script cannot hallucinate a field and costs no tokens.

Which should I choose?

Pick Sume's schedule when the brief is fixed and you want no server of your own. Pick plain cron plus a Format when your data drives the video and you need webhooks and a structured result. Pick Hermes cron when an agent must decide the input. In all three, set a spend cap you chose on purpose, and decide in advance what a skipped week should look like, because a skipped run delivers no webhook.