A daily 9:16 clip for 30 days on Sume: what the month costs

A daily 5-second clip for 30 days costs $18.90 on Gemini Omni Flash 1.1 at 720p, $5.70 at 360p, $28.20 at 1080p, and $15.00 on MiniMax H3 Max at 768p. Each job is the provider list price times 1.25 rounded up to the cent, from the Video Router catalog (read 2026-10-06), multiplied by 30. This is the budget line for a creator or brand account that posted a daily Sora clip until the API ended on 2026-09-24 (Magic Hour tracker, read 2026-10-06).

Thirty is not the whole story, since most daily workflows retake. The second table adds a retake allowance.

Thirty clips, one per day

What the arithmetic assumes

• Each clip is its own job rounded up on its own, so the month is 30 times the per-clip figure, not 150 seconds times a per-second rate.
• Sume reserves the billable amount at submit and usage.cost shows what a finished job captured. A failed job releases or refunds its reservation where that applies, per the admission docs.
• H3 Max at 768p is native; its 1080p is a latent refinement from 768p and costs more.
• Omni makes 16:9 and 9:16 only, which suits a vertical feed; the others may list more ratios.

The scheduler

A cron-style script submits the day's clip with a key made from the date, so a rerun on the same day returns the same job rather than a second charge.

import datetime
import os
import requests

today = datetime.date.today().isoformat()
r = requests.post(
    "https://api.sume.com/v1/videos",
    headers={
        "Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['SUME_API_KEY']}",
        "Idempotency-Key": f"daily-clip-{today}",
    },
    json={"model": "gemini-omni-flash-1.1",
          "prompt": f"A quiet street at dawn, {today}, gentle camera drift",
          "aspect_ratio": "9:16", "resolution": "720p", "duration": 5},
    timeout=30,
)
r.raise_for_status()
print(today, r.json()["id"])

Ways to spend less

Draft at 360p on Omni, which costs $0.19 per 5 seconds, and re-render only the winner at 720p. A month of daily drafts plus one 720p final per day is $5.70 plus $18.90, or $24.60, against $37.80 for retaking at 720p twice. If the clip is background texture, 360p may be enough on its own.

The per-second table shows how the rates are built, and the $25 budget post counts clips for a fixed spend. For the history of what the retired API charged, see the per-second history.

Turning the month into a budget line

A daily clip is a standing cost, so it needs a ceiling and an alert, not a guess. Take the 720p Omni figure of $18.90, add the retake allowance you measured, and set the monthly cap a little above that. If the month's captured spend crosses the cap, the scheduler should stop submitting and tell a person, rather than quietly burn through the balance.

Because Sume reserves the billable amount at submit, a balance that is lower than one clip's price returns a 402 before any job exists. That is a useful backstop but a poor alert: by then the day's clip has been missed. Compare the balance with a few days of expected spend each morning instead, and top up before the check fails.

If the clip is part of a product that customers pay for, pass the cost through in your own price rather than absorbing it, and show the retake allowance as part of the estimate. A creator who sees a monthly figure up front is easier to keep than one who sees a surprise at renewal.

• Set a monthly cap as a number in config, next to the model id and resolution.
• Sum usage.cost from completed jobs, not your estimates, for the running total.
• Log the key you used each day. The date-based key means a manual rerun the same day returns the same job and costs nothing extra.
• Review the month once. If most days used the first take, drop the retake allowance; if most needed two, raise it or fix the prompt template.