Is Wan 3.0 free? The README lists no price; Sume's floor is $0.125

Short answer

No free tier is stated for Wan 3.0 in the places I checked. The official Alibaba Wan 3.0 README on GitHub (read 2026-10-05) lists the features (native 30 second generation, up to 20 reference assets, video editing, text rendering in 12 languages) and points to Wan Explore and QwenCloud for access. It names no price, no free quota and no API rate. If a page tells you Wan 3.0 is free, ask which plan, which resolution and which daily limit, because the vendor README does not say.

On Sume, Wan 3.0 is a paid catalog model. The Video Router docs list wan-3.0 at 2 to 30 seconds per job, and Sume bills the provider list price times 1.25. The cheapest job you can submit is therefore 2 seconds at 480p.

What the smallest jobs cost

Sume's rate table lists Wan 3.0 at 480p, 720p and 1080p. The API pricing page is generated from the same constants the API bills with, according to the usage docs. Multiplying the Sume per-second rate by clip length gives this table.

What happens when the wallet is empty

Sume reserves the estimated cost when it accepts the job. If your balance cannot cover that estimate, the submit fails with 402 insufficient_credits before provider work starts (Generation admission). A successful job captures the reserved amount; a failed job or a cancel before generation starts releases it.

That makes the 2-second 480p clip a cheap probe of your whole pipeline: key, balance read, submit, poll, download. At $0.125 you can test authentication and webhooks without risking a large reservation.

How to run the probe

Send a minimal Video Router request and read the balance before and after.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-router/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: wan-probe-001" \
  -d '{"model":"wan-3.0","prompt":"A paper boat on a desk, soft window light","resolution":"480p","duration":2,"mode":"async"}'

Limits worth knowing

• Concurrency is plan-only: Free runs 1 job at a time with 5 queued, so a batch of probes waits in queued rather than failing.
• There is no seed on v1 video models, so a 480p probe is not a preview of the exact take you get at 1080p.
• Confirm the live rate in GET /v1/videos/models (pricing_skus) before any bulk run.

Where the feature list stops and the price starts

The README is a feature document. It describes instruction-based and reference-based video editing, automatic scene splitting, pixel-level box-selection editing, up to 12 sequential images with a cohesive style, and up to 20 reference assets including documents and webpages. None of that is a price, and the README does not say whether Wan Explore or QwenCloud meter usage. That is why the honest answer to "is Wan 3.0 free" is "not stated there" rather than yes or no.

Two practical consequences follow. First, a comparison table that puts "free" next to Wan 3.0 is either quoting a promotion you should verify on the access page you intend to use, or guessing. Second, because you cannot price a vendor-side free allowance in advance, any production plan needs a metered path with a number you can read. On Sume that number is pricing_skus in GET /v1/videos/models and the reserved row in GET /v1/usage after a submit.

A small test plan makes the floor concrete. Suppose you want to try Wan 3.0 on twenty prompts. At 480p and 5 seconds each, a job is $0.3125, so the twenty cost $6.25. Re-rendering the five best at 1080p and 5 seconds is $1.25 each, another $6.25. The whole experiment is $12.50, and each step is a separate job with its own reserve and capture.

Because no v1 video model accepts seed, the 1080p re-render is a new take, not an upscale of the 480p one. Plan the second pass as fresh generations and keep the prompts identical.