Twelve-episode Shorts season: render cost at 60 to 180 seconds

Short answer

At Sume's documented render rate of $0.10 per ceil(output minute), a 12-episode season costs $1.20 if every episode is 60 seconds, $2.40 at 90 or 120 seconds, and $3.60 at 150 or 180 seconds. The rounding is per episode, so a 61-second episode costs as much as a 120-second one.

Why the season shape matters

YouTube's Shorts series page says episodes must be portrait or square, up to 180 seconds, with a season number and numbering by publish date (read 2026-10-05). YouTube's Sept 23, 2026 post says microdramas passed 6.5 billion views in the first half of 2026 and that watch time grew more than 50 percent year over year, with TV views up more than 90 percent (read 2026-10-05). Those numbers describe the format's demand, not what your series will earn, but they explain why episode count and length are budget questions.

Cost by episode length

The rate is per whole output minute, so the billable minutes are the episode length divided by 60 and rounded up.

The arithmetic in code

The function works in whole cents, so the totals have no floating-point noise. Change the lengths, the rate or the episode count to match your own plan. It prints the same five rows as the table.

import math

RATE_CENTS = 10

def season_cents(seconds, episodes=12):
    minutes = math.ceil(seconds / 60)
    return minutes * RATE_CENTS * episodes

for secs in (60, 90, 120, 150, 180):
    print(secs, "s -> $%.2f" % (season_cents(secs) / 100))

What it leaves out

This is the render line only. If each episode is cut from a longer source, add $0.02 per episode for video trim, which is $0.24 for twelve. Captions are priced separately: the docs state $0.20 for a video up to 60 seconds, so check the live catalog for longer ones. Generated clips, voice and music are separate lines with their own prices.

The plan call is free, so check one episode before you multiply. It returns billable_minutes for the real slots, which is better than the length you meant to hit.

Ways to lower it

Stay at or under the minute boundary. A 62-second episode bills as 2 minutes, so trimming 2 seconds halves the render line for that episode. Across 12 episodes that saves $1.20. If a story beat needs 90 seconds, make it 120 and use the time, since the bill is the same. The cheapest lever is knowing where the boundaries are before you edit.

A second lever is episode count. Twelve episodes of 150 seconds cost $3.60 to render, while eight episodes of 180 seconds cost $2.40. Compare cost per minute of story too. A 150-second episode is 2.5 minutes of content for 3 billed minutes, about 83 percent efficient, a 180-second one is 100 percent, and a 90-second one is 75 percent. The percentages are plain division of content seconds by billed seconds, and they only show which lengths waste the rounding.