Topaz API credit price: $0.12, $0.10 or $0.08 vs Sume upscale

Topaz's API page (read 2026-10-02) lists three self-serve tiers: Starter at $0.12 per credit, Developer at $50 a month with 500 credits and $0.10 per extra credit, and Scale at $240 a month with 3,000 credits and $0.08 per extra credit. Sume's flat image upscale is higher per image, and the two products are not the same thing.

The tiers

The page also lists Enterprise as custom pricing with on-premise deployment, and notes that on the Developer plan credits carry over month to month. The Starter tier is marked as coming soon. Dividing the plan fees by the included credits gives $0.10 and $0.08 per credit, which matches the per-credit prices printed.

What one credit buys

The page states that 1 API credit equals a 32 MP Enhance output for images. I read that as one credit covering an enhanced image up to 32 megapixels, so an image costs $0.08 to $0.12 depending on tier; confirm the exact rule on the page before you rely on it.

For video, the page I fetched does not say how many credits a video second or a video job uses. I therefore cannot give a Topaz price per video second here, and neither should a comparison that pretends to.

Sume's rates, for scale

On the API pricing page, Sume's image upscale is $0.20 per image, described as reserving about 16 megapixels of generative output, and video upscale is $0.009 per input second with a 5-second default reserve and a 30-second maximum per job, so a 10-second clip is $0.09.

So per image, Sume's flat $0.20 is above Topaz's $0.08 to $0.12 per credit. The comparison is rough: Sume bills a generative upscale model with a fixed price and no monthly fee, while Topaz sells Enhance output by the megapixel. If you upscale thousands of stills a month, the Topaz plan wins on price; if you upscale occasionally and want no subscription, a pay-per-job wallet is simpler.

A quick decision rule

Count your monthly images. At the Developer plan, 500 credits for $50 is the break-even against paying $0.10 each, and the plan only helps when you use credits beyond what pay-as-you-go would cost. Sume has no minimum, so below a few hundred images a month the fixed fee is the larger number on the Topaz side.