100 Shopify SKUs with avatar product clips: cost and submit waves

A 15-second Sume avatar clip with a product image costs $2.91 on the standard tier, $3.87 on plus and $8.70 on max, so a 100-SKU catalog is $291, $387 or $870 at list rates. Shopify's help page says product video files can be up to 10 minutes, up to 1 GB, up to 4K, and .mp4, .mov or .webm, so a short clip is far inside what a product page will take.

The Shopify limits are from its product media page, read 2026-10-03. Sume's rates and limits are from API pricing, Generate avatar video and Generation admission.

What does the catalog cost?

Sume prices avatar video per second, with a separate with-product rate when a product_image is sent. For a catalog the product image is the point, so the with-product rate is the one to budget. The table uses a 15-second clip, which fits a short hook, a feature and a call to action.

What does Shopify accept?

On the Shopify side the requirements are generous for short clips: up to 10 minutes, up to 1 GB, up to 4K resolution, and .mp4, .mov or .webm. Shopify says it converts and serves every video as .mp4 or HLS. Sume's avatar video is 720p, so there is no resolution headroom to worry about on Shopify's side; the question is whether 720p is sharp enough for your theme's video block, which you can check on one SKU first.

The media field rules also matter. Sume's product_image must be a fetchable public HTTPS URL, so a Shopify CDN image URL works as long as it is public, and localhost or private-network URLs are rejected before generation.

• One avatar per final video; one job per SKU.
• Use a vertical 9:16 default for mobile product pages, or choose another supported ratio.
• Keep the SKU in your own table next to the returned job_id.

Submitting 100 jobs without a 429

Accepted capacity is 6 on Free, 24 on Pro, 48 on Startup and 120 on Scale and Enterprise. A hundred jobs at once therefore fit only on Scale or Enterprise. On Pro, submit in waves: a fresh Pro workspace reports wave_size_hint of 18, which is floor of 24 times 0.75, and the docs call it a hint for submission waves, not a concurrency limit.

Between waves, poll status with backoff and submit more as queue_capacity_remaining grows. A 429 queue_full means wait, not fail, and retrying with the same Idempotency-Key is safe. Derive the key from the SKU and a version, so rerunning the script after a crash does not pay twice for the same SKU.

Not every SKU needs a clip. A hero set of 20 products at 15 seconds with a product image is $58.20 on standard and $77.40 on plus, which is a cheaper first test than the whole catalog. Watch how shoppers use those pages before you render the long tail, and keep the SKU-to-job table so the rest can be added in later waves.