Startup founder's Q4 investor update as a narrated video: $0.29

A founder can turn a Q4 investor update into a narrated video of eight slides for $0.19 on Sume: a 1,800-character voiceover ($0.09) and a render of about 100 seconds, which bills as two minutes ($0.20). A 60-second captioned cut is $0.35 (read 2026-10-03).

Investor updates for the fourth quarter go out in January, once the books close, but the script and slides can be drafted in December. A narrated video does not replace the written update: it gives the investors who skim a two-minute version they can forward.

What the tool does and does not do

You build the eight slides in your own deck tool and export them as images. Sume does not read your numbers, and none should be written by an image model. Import the images, generate the voiceover from your final script, and render with Timeline: voiceover as the spine, eight slides as video[] slots whose durations add up to the voiceover length.

Pace is simple arithmetic. 1,800 characters at a typical speaking rate is roughly two minutes, but measure the real file and set audio.duration_seconds to it. If the narration is 61 seconds, the render is billed as two minutes; if it is 100 seconds it is also two minutes, so the two-minute version is not more expensive than a 70-second one.

Confidentiality and disclosure

An update often contains material that is not public. Before you upload slides to any service, check your investor agreements and your company's policy on third-party processing. Media imported for a render must be on Sume-hosted URLs, so decide whether that fits.

Say in the opening line that the voice is generated if your investors would expect to hear you. If you prefer your own voice, record it and use the render step only. The cost to regenerate after a late-breaking change is a new voiceover and render: $0.09 plus $0.20 is $0.29. Four quarterly updates a year come to $1.16 for the two-minute version (read 2026-10-03).

Budget and checks before you start

Write the script before the slides. Eight beats work well: headline number, what changed, what worked, what did not, the ask, hiring, runway and the next quarter. Each beat gets about 12 seconds. Draft in December, fill in the final numbers in January, and generate the voiceover only after the numbers are fixed, since the voiceover is the one line item you will not want to redo.

Always keep the written update as the source of truth, with the video linked at the top. Investors who want the details will go to the text, and an inaccurate number in a narrated video is harder to correct than in an email.