Thanksgiving pie pre-order cutoff: three countdown cuts, one still

To run a Thanksgiving pie pre-order with a visible cutoff, make one pie still and render three short cuts from it, each with a spoken deadline that matches the day it is posted: ten days out, three days out, and last call. Three cuts cost about $0.61 on Sume ($0.275 for the still, $0.30 for three renders and $0.0314 for three voice reads). OPM lists Thanksgiving Day 2026 as Thursday, Nov 26, which the countdown below counts back from.

What are the three dates?

Count back from Thursday, Nov 26. Ten days out is Monday, Nov 16. Three days out is Monday, Nov 23. The last-call cut posts on the cutoff day you set, for example Tuesday, Nov 24, if your kitchen needs a day to bake before pickup. The spoken line changes in each cut; the picture does not.

How is one still reused three times?

Generate the still once with Ideogram 4.5 at high quality ($0.275), since it carries all three posts. Import it, then send three Timeline renders, each with the same still held for the length of its own voice-over. A still in Timeline is a static hold, and one billed minute is $0.10 no matter how short the clip is, so a 10-second cut and a 20-second cut cost the same.

Keep text off the picture itself, and keep the pie itself plain: a whole pie on a table, no logo that you would need to correct later. The deadline lives in the voice and in the caption you type on the post, so you never have to regenerate an image because a date moved.

What does each cut cost?

Each voice read is about 220 characters, which is $0.01045 at Sume's $0.0475 per 1,000 characters. Three of them cost $0.0314. Add the three renders and the single still and you get the total at the top. If you also want the cut in Spanish, double the voice and render lines, which adds about $0.33.

• Still: 1 image at high quality, $0.275.
• Renders: 3 output minutes at $0.10, $0.30.
• Voice: 3 reads of 220 characters, $0.0314 together.

What if the cutoff moves?

Re-run only the cut that changed. Every cut is its own render, so editing the Nov 23 version never touches the Nov 16 file you already posted. Write the new deadline in the voice line and in the post caption on the same day, and check that both say the same thing. The still stays valid, and a voice read costs about a cent, so a changed deadline costs roughly $0.11 per cut. Keep each render's inputs in a note so you can repeat it with the new line.