10-SKU AI video ad pilot before Black Friday: priced line by line

A ten-SKU pilot of AI video ads costs about $22.74 on Sume at 720p, or about $26.52 if two clips need a retake. Black Friday is Nov 27, 2026, so a pilot run in the week of Oct 5 leaves time to learn which product photos survive motion before you commit a full catalog. The numbers below come from the Sume pricing code and the Sume pricing page, read 2026-10-05; billable price is the provider price times 1.25.

The four lines per SKU

Each SKU gets the same short chain: an image edit that cleans the product photo, one image-to-video clip, captions burned in from authored cues, and a Timeline render that appends an end card. Image-to-video on Sume uses POST /v1/videos with a first_frame entry in frame_images, described in the videos docs.

Ten SKUs and two retakes

Ten SKUs at $2.2735 is $22.735. If two clips come back with a bent label or a warped hand and you regenerate only the motion step, add 2 x $1.89 = $3.78 for $26.515 total. Captions and Timeline are deterministic, so they are not repeated unless the copy changes.

The caption line works on silent clips only if you send cues with text, start and end; without them the job fails with caption_no_speech, as the caption docs state. The caption price covers videos of 60 seconds or less.

What the pilot should decide

Use the pilot to choose a motion tier, not to prove a campaign. Re-price the same ten SKUs on Seedance 2-mini at 720p ($0.945 for 5 s) or Wan 3.0 at 720p ($0.625) and compare the clips side by side.

• Keep photos that survive a 5 s clip without label drift; those SKUs move to the full run.
• Move SKUs that fail twice to a still-image ad instead of paying for a third clip.
• Write the per-SKU cost into your sheet so the full-catalog multiplication is arithmetic, not a guess.

For the catalog-scale version of this arithmetic see the four-phase Black Friday budget, and for how rejects change the total see the reject-rate budget.