Sume timeline $0.10 per minute: a reserve ceiling or a fixed bill?

The published timeline prices, **$0.10 per output minute** for render and flat amounts for audio, compose, filter, trim, detach and captions, are the amounts Sume reserves. Capture is built to be container seconds x Modal list x 1.25, plus the 5.5% fee, clipped to that reserve. Until the stamped release is in prod, the flat amount is what you are charged.

The flat prices

These are the numbers in the public price table:

What the reserve means

The timeline family (render, audio, compose, filter, trim, detach and captions) reserves the flat price as its ceiling. When a job finishes, the capture is the Modal container seconds the job used at Modal list x 1.25, plus the platform fee. Captions add Scribe v2 x 1.25 for the transcript. The capture can never exceed the reserve, because it is clipped to the hold.

If a job carries no container-second stamps, the flat amount is captured as-is. That is the case today for prod timeline and caption jobs, until the release that carries the stamps ships. So treat the table above as the bill now, and as the upper bound afterwards.

Why this is good for budgeting

You can compute a worst case from the table before you run anything. A 61-second render is two billable minutes, so $0.20. A one-minute render plus one trim and one compose step is $0.10 + $0.02 + $0.02 = $0.14, and the table gives you that sum without any measurement.

Modal's page lists $0.0000131 per core-second, so even a render shape that ran for the full ceiling would be priced from a published rate, not from a discretionary one.

Reading the result

After the job, the usage row shows the list, model and fee fields. If the capture was lower than the reserve, the difference is released back to your balance. If the capture hit the ceiling, price_book_clipped_to_hold is 1.

Billable minutes round up

Render is priced per ceil of the output minute. A 61-second render is two billable minutes, so $0.20, and a 59-second render is one. If you are near a minute boundary, trimming a second can halve the ceiling.

The same applies to the stamped capture once it ships: it is clipped to the reserve, so rounding up the minute is the maximum you can ever pay for the render step.

What to do now

Budget with the flat table. It is exact for today's captures and is an upper bound later. When the stamped release reaches prod, nothing in your requests changes. Your usage rows begin to show container-second captures under the same ceilings, and the amounts can only go down from the flat price.