Ugly Christmas sweater listings: 60 cutouts and 10 heroes, $3.35

Cutting the background out of 60 ugly Christmas sweater photos costs $1.35 on Sume, because background removal is $0.0225 per image. If you also upscale the 10 best photos to sharpen your hero shots, at $0.20 each, the batch costs $3.35. Both are fixed prices, so the total is known before you start.

Novelty sweaters sell on a quick glance at a thumbnail. A clean cutout on a single color makes the pattern read from a distance, and the same cutouts can sit on a seasonal backdrop in an ad.

What does each step cost?

Both steps are published catalog prices on origin/main, read 2026-10-11. Background removal reserves one fixed price per image. Image upscale reserves roughly 16 output megapixels of generative upscaling at a fixed $0.20 per image.

Which photos deserve the upscale?

Upscale the hero shot for each of your ten best sellers, not every angle. Marketplace thumbnails are small, so only the image that fills the product page or a print ad needs the extra detail. Photos taken on a phone in good light usually have enough pixels without it.

If you upscale all 60 instead, the upscaling line becomes $12.00 and the batch $13.35, which is almost nine times the cutout line. Pick the heroes. A middle path is to upscale the hero shot only for sweaters that sold at least a few units last season, and leave the rest at their original size.

How do you run 60 jobs without losing track?

Submit each image as its own job with an idempotency key built from the SKU, for example the sweater id plus the step name. Sume requires an Idempotency-Key on paid writes so a retry after a network error is a repeat of one request, not a second order. Sume's MCP tool list shows rmbg and image upscale as separate create calls, and results come back through the standard job flow.

Name the outputs by SKU as you download them. A folder of 60 files called result-1 to result-60 is a mess a week later.

When should the listings go live?

Aim to finish the cutouts well before your Black Friday ads go out, since the same clean images can go straight into the ad creative without another edit. For the thumbnail grid, keep the same crop and the same flat background across all 60 so the page looks like one store rather than 60 photos.