Weekly AI release-notes video: 52 x 30 seconds, annual cost on Sume

A weekly 30-second AI presenter release-notes video for a year is 1560 seconds of avatar video: $382.20 on Plus, $287.04 on Standard and $858.00 on Max at Sume's listed rates, plus $6.50 if you generate a fresh music bed each week and $0.95 once for the avatar (read 2026-10-03). On Plus with music the year comes to $389.65, about $7.4933 per episode.

Release notes are a good fit for script-driven avatar video: the content is text you already have in a changelog, the audience wants a quick scan, and nobody expects a live presenter. The only recurring work is trimming the changelog to roughly 75 spoken words.

Where the money goes

Almost all of the annual cost is the per-second avatar rate. Music is a fixed price per generation regardless of length, so a weekly bed adds only a few dollars. The avatar creation charge is paid once, and you reuse the same handle every week, which also gives subscribers a consistent face. The avatar video docs describe the tiers, and Music 1.0 confirms the fixed music price.

The table compares the annual bill by tier, assuming no product image is attached and every clip is accepted first time.

A template that keeps it cheap

Fix the structure so each week is a fill-in-the-blanks exercise: a 3-second hook naming the release, three 7-second feature lines, and a 6-second closing line. Using multi-scene video_inputs, you can lay these out explicitly, with a silent beat if you want a screen recording to play. The total must still land between 4 and 60 seconds, and 30 seconds is a comfortable target.

Keep the background prompt identical every week, so that the series looks like a series. Change only the script. If you attach a product image, the per-second rate is slightly higher, so reserve that for launch weeks.

Budget code

The calculation below is a quick sanity check for your finance team. Adjust weeks, seconds and the tier rate to match your plan.

import asyncio

async def main() -> None:
    weeks, seconds, plus = 52, 30, 0.245
    video = weeks * seconds * plus
    music = weeks * 0.125            # one fixed-price track per episode
    print(f"video ${video:,.2f} + music ${music:.2f} + avatar $0.95 = ${video + music + 0.95:,.2f}")

asyncio.run(main())

Operational notes

If a week has no meaningful release, skip the video. The cheapest second is the one you never render.

• Submit on a fixed day with a unique Idempotency-Key per episode, for example release-2026-w41.
• Read the workspace balance before the weekly run so a low balance does not delay the post.
• Store the job id and result URL beside the changelog entry.
• Enable inline captions if the video will play muted in a feed; failure there leaves the clean video intact.

Writing the 75-word script

A 30-second clip is roughly 70 to 80 spoken words, which is far shorter than most changelog entries. Pick the three changes a user will notice, state each as a benefit in one sentence, and end with where to find the rest. Leave version numbers and internal ticket ids out; a presenter reading 'PR 4,312' is the fastest way to lose the audience.

Because Sume estimates the video's duration from the script, you can check length before submitting: paste the script into a word counter and divide by about 2.5 words per second. If the estimate drifts over 60 seconds the request is rejected, and a 30-second target leaves wide margin.

When the weekly cadence breaks

Holidays, big launches and quiet weeks all change the plan. Treat the annual figure as a ceiling: skip a week and you save $7.35 on Plus. For a major release, a one-off 60-second Max clip costs $33.00, still small next to the work that went into the release. Keep the cadence as a default and the exceptions as decisions, not as process.