Timeline render of 61 seconds bills 2 minutes: trim 1 s, pay half

A Sume timeline render of 61 seconds bills two output minutes, $0.20, while 60 seconds bills one, $0.10. The public rate is $0.10 per ceil(output minute), with a minimum of one minute and a maximum of 30, so trimming a single second off a 61-second edit halves the render charge. The job uses no provider inference, only worker ffmpeg, so the price is the whole story.

At small scale this is cents. At campaign scale it is a real saving: 500 renders of 61 seconds cost $100.00 and 500 renders of 60 seconds cost $50.00.

Billing by length

The arithmetic

Billable minutes = ceil(seconds / 60). For 61 seconds that is ceil(1.017) = 2, so 2 x $0.10 = $0.20. For 121 seconds, ceil(2.017) = 3, so $0.30. The reserve uses ceil(audio.duration_seconds / 60) minutes. The catalog lists a minimum of 1 minute ($0.10) and a maximum of 30 minutes ($3.00, or 1800 seconds).

The fee column applies the 5.5% platform fee from Sume's pricing policy: $0.10 x 1.055 = $0.1055, and $0.20 x 1.055 = $0.211.

Steps

• Add up the clip durations and voice or music length; the audio track length drives the reserve.
• If the total sits just over a minute boundary (61 s, 121 s), shorten a clip or a pause by one or two seconds.
• Do not pad to 60 seconds just because it is cheaper if the edit is better at 62; the saving is ten cents.
• Read billable_minutes in the finished job result to confirm what you were charged.

A batch example

A team that renders 40 product videos a week at 62 seconds pays 40 x $0.20 = $8.00 a week. Tighten each by two seconds to 60 and the bill is 40 x $0.10 = $4.00, which is $208.00 less across 52 weeks. The render fee is small next to the clip cost, so the case for trimming is about habit, not about the budget: the same edit that tightens the pacing also halves the fee.

For long-form, the step is the same. A 10-minute render is $1.00 and a 10:01 render is $1.10, a 10% jump for one second.

What Sume does not do

Sume does not prorate a timeline render by the second, and does not charge more for resolution or frame rate: the default output is 1080x1920 MP4, and the rate is per minute. The separate concat, split, compose and trim jobs have their own flat prices of $0.01 or $0.02 each. Figures read on 2026-10-08.