Tavus Basic free 25 minutes vs what $5 buys in Sume avatar video

The short answer

Tavus Basic is listed as free with 25 minutes of conversational video, 1 stream and 25 stock replicas. For $5 on Sume you get 27 seconds of a rendered Standard avatar clip (27 x $0.184 = $4.97) or 20 seconds on Plus ($4.90). Tavus sells a live two-way conversation by the minute; Sume produces a finished MP4 from a script. Source: Tavus pricing (read 2026-10-04).

What Tavus lists

Tavus lists three plans I compared. Starter is $59 with 100 minutes, 3 streams, 3 custom replicas and $0.37 per minute overage. Growth is $397 with 1,250 minutes, 10 streams, 7 replicas and $0.32 per minute overage.

Why the unit prices look far apart

Dividing Tavus's price by its included minutes gives $0.59 per minute on Starter and about $0.32 on Growth ($397 / 1,250 = $0.3176). Sume's cheapest minute is $11.04 on Standard. These figures are not comparable as prices because a live minute is a conversation that a person is in, while a rendered minute is a produced clip that can be reused, captioned and posted.

Concurrency and what is known up front

Tavus lists 1, 3 and 10 streams on Basic, Starter and Growth, and a stream is a live conversation held open. Sume runs 1, 4, 8 or 20 jobs at once depending on plan. A live minute is open-ended, so its cost depends on how long the conversation lasts. A rendered clip has a price known from the script before you submit: 15 seconds on Plus is $3.675, no matter how many people watch it.

When to choose which

Use Tavus when the viewer talks back. Use Sume when you need the same talking presenter to say a fixed script to everyone, and the clip is an asset: you can reuse it across channels, caption it with an inline style, and pay once per render instead of per viewing minute. If an interactive agent is the product, the Tavus Basic free 25 minutes is a sensible way to test it. For a recorded ad, test with one 4-second Standard clip at $0.736 first.

Sume keeps jobs idempotent with an Idempotency-Key and enforces queue limits per plan, so a small trial does not need special setup. Read the batch limits before scaling and the per-minute comparison for a longer look at the live-versus-rendered gap.