Shotstack renders at 5 to 20 cents a minute; Sume Timeline is 10

Sume Timeline costs $0.10 per output minute, rounded up, which matches Shotstack's Scale plan at 10 cents a minute, beats its pay-as-you-go 20 cents and Starter 15.6 and Pro 13.2 cents, and loses to Volume at 5 cents. So below roughly the Scale tier, Sume is cheaper per rendered minute; at 10,000 minutes a month Shotstack Volume is half the price.

Shotstack's own table

Shotstack's page lists Pay as you go at $10 for 50 minutes, Starter at $39 a month for 250 minutes, Pro at $99 for 750, Scale at $199 for 2,000 and Volume at $499 for 10,000, and gives the cost per rendered minute for each. New accounts get 10 credits valid for 30 days.

Rounding matters

Sume bills per ceil(output minute), so a 61-second video is two billable minutes, $0.20. The reserve is ceil(audio duration over 60). With many 30-second clips this rounding doubles the effective rate to 20 cents per actual minute, the same as Shotstack pay as you go. Shotstack's page speaks of rendered minutes; check how it rounds before comparing short clips.

Steps: compare on your clip lengths

• List the lengths of your typical outputs in seconds.
• For Sume, compute ceil(seconds over 60) times $0.10 for each.
• For Shotstack, multiply minutes by the plan rate you would hold.
• Pick the lower total at your monthly volume.

What Sume does not do

Sume Timeline uses no provider inference, only worker ffmpeg, and works from clips already imported into media.sume.com. It does not offer a monthly plan with a lower per-minute rate at volume; the docs list one public rate. For very high volume, Shotstack Volume lists 5 cents.

A 500-minute month

Take 500 rendered minutes of one-minute videos. Shotstack Pro at $99 gives 750 minutes, so the effective cost is $99 at 13.2 cents on a full plan, or $66 if you could pay only for the 500 minutes at that rate. Sume Timeline at $0.10 per rounded minute is $50. If your videos are 70 seconds each, Sume rounds each up to two minutes, which makes it $0.20 per video and $100 for 500 videos. Know your length distribution before trusting any flat rate.

What the Sume render does and does not include

The Timeline docs describe a render program that places clips and audio, with soft warnings for padded or looped short sources and snapped transitions that are not failures. There is no provider inference in the job, so the $0.10 covers the ffmpeg render only. If your clips come from a generation model, add that cost per clip. Shotstack's per-minute figures are for its own render engine and templates.

Verdict

For under about 2,000 rendered minutes a month with clips near a whole minute, Sume Timeline is at or below Shotstack's list. For many tiny clips or very high volume, do the arithmetic with your own lengths first.