What does Sume's 25% cover? Container boot, idle tail and storage

Sume does not add separate line items for container boot, the idle scaledown tail, min_containers floors or Volume storage. Those costs are absorbed by the **25% on top of list**. The per-job charge is container seconds x Modal list x 1.25, plus the 5.5% platform fee, clipped to the hold.

What is and is not billed per job

Modal bills the account for time containers run, including the time a container sits warm after work ends. A direct Modal user sees that in the bill as one pool of seconds. Sume customers do not have a Modal account, so the pool is Sume's.

What the platform fee covers

E2B, the sandbox the agent uses, and the model sandbox have no second meter either. There is one fee, the 5.5% platform fee, and it covers them.

The arithmetic a Modal user would check

Modal's pricing page lists $0.0000131 per physical core-second and $0.00000222 per GiB-second. A Sume job's model price is those rates times the seconds it used, times 1.25. If you rent the same shape directly, you pay the list rate for the job, plus whatever idle tail and storage your account accumulates.

The honest comparison is therefore: direct is cheaper per busy second, and Sume is a flat 1.31875 multiplier that includes the idle time you would otherwise carry.

When this matters

For bursty media work, such as a probe here and a frame sample there, the idle tail can be larger than the job itself. For a steady workload that keeps a container busy, direct Modal is closer to its list price. If that is you, compare against the 31.875% total, not against the 25% alone.

Why Sume does not itemize it

Itemizing boot time and idle tails would make the bill depend on how busy the shared pool happened to be when your job ran. A flat multiplier on the published rate gives every customer the same price for the same job, whatever else is running.

The tradeoff is explicit: you pay for a job's busy seconds at 1.25x list, and you do not see or pay for the warm containers that make the next job start quickly.

Using this to estimate

If you want the cost of a Modal-priced job, use the Modal rates x the seconds x 1.31875. You do not need to guess an idle surcharge. The min_containers floors, which keep some containers warm so jobs start fast, are not a separate meter either.

Sume's published Modal card id is modal_list_2026-09-22_x1.25, so you can tell which rate card a usage row was priced from.