Split a $200 monthly Sume budget across five workflows

A $200 month on Sume split 35% to hero avatar clips, 25% to product clips, 15% to images, 10% to captions and renders and 15% to a retry reserve buys 12 Standard 30-second avatar clips, 100 H3 Max clips, 539 medium images and 66 caption-and-render finishes, with $30 held back. The split is a starting point, not a rule.

Each count rounds down because you cannot buy a fraction of a clip, so a few cents of every line stay unspent. All unit prices are Sume list-rate estimates read on 2026-10-03.

Why split by workflow

A single monthly number hides which workflow is overspending. Giving each workflow its own line makes an overrun visible early: if hero clips have spent $70 by the 10th, you know before the money is gone. It also forces a decision about what the reserve is for. Retries on the expensive lines, the avatar clips and H3 Max clips, are where reserve money goes, so the reserve here is sized against those lines.

Reading the table

The unit prices are $5.52 for a 30-second Standard avatar clip, $0.50 for a five-second H3 Max clip, $0.055625 for a medium image with no size set (an upper-bound estimate; a request that names a small size is billed less) and $0.30 for a caption job plus a one-minute render. The finishing line assumes each deliverable is captioned and rendered separately; joining clips first cuts it, as the finishing-cost post shows.

The reserve of $30 covers five more Standard avatar clips, or 60 more H3 Max clips. Retries rarely land on one line only, so keep it as one pool, not four.

Adjusting the split

Move shares only with evidence. If your keepers per clip are low on product clips, raise that line and cut images, which are cheap to redo. If you never touch the reserve for two months, shrink it to 10% and move five points to the line that most often ran out.

Top-ups are manual dashboard purchases. Buy the month at once if cash flow allows, or buy half at the start and half mid-month, and watch GET /v1/balance for the remaining balance.

• Write the monthly split in a file next to your code.
• Check spend by line on the 10th, 20th and last day.
• Re-read the rates before each month; they can change.

A worked check on the 10th

Suppose by the 10th you have submitted 5 avatar clips ($27.60), 30 product clips ($15.00), 120 images ($6.68) and 10 finishes ($3.00). That is $52.28 spent, about 26% of the month after a third of it. The avatar line is on pace at $27.60 of $70 but the product line is at 30% of its budget, so one of them will need a note in your plan. Nothing is wrong yet; the check just tells you where to look.

If the wallet balance is lower than your ledger suggests, remember that queued and processing jobs hold their estimate until they settle.