Cost of 10 TikTok carousels (80 AI slides) by image model

Ten TikTok photo carousels of eight slides each need 80 images, and at Sume's billable rates that costs $0.59 on GPT Image 2.5 at low quality and $22.00 on Ideogram 4.5 at high quality. The model and quality setting matter more than anything else you do: the same 80 slides span a factor of about 37 in price.

All of these are per-image billable amounts, meaning the provider list price times the 1.25 house margin. Eight slides per carousel is our planning number, not a platform requirement; change the slide count and multiply. The pricing is read from Sume's pricing package and the image docs on 2026-10-03.

The price of one image, by model

The GPT Image 2.5 rows are token-priced. Sume's image docs give the underlying Fal rates as $30 per million output image tokens, $8 per million input image tokens and $5 per million input text tokens, and the pricing package turns that into $0.0059 list for a 1024 by 1024 low-quality image, $0.0132 for medium and $0.0527 for high. Multiplying by 1.25 gives the per-image figures in the table.

Ideogram 4.5 is flat per image by quality whatever the size: list $0.03, $0.06 or $0.22, which become $0.0375, $0.075 and $0.275. Ideogram is the one to look at when the slide text matters, because its price does not move with resolution. The other rows are flat per image.

Retakes are the real variable

The last two columns assume that every first generation is not usable. At 1.5x, one slide in two is regenerated once; at 2x, every slide is generated twice on average. Carousels punish retakes less than video does because one bad slide costs a few cents rather than a few dollars.

Mixed quality is the usual answer. One cover slide on Ideogram 4.5 high ($0.275) plus seven body slides on GPT Image 2.5 medium ($0.1155) is $0.3905 per carousel, or $3.905 for ten.

A quick way to check the arithmetic

Take the GPT Image 2.5 medium row: $0.0165 per image times 8 slides is $0.132 per carousel, times 10 carousels is $1.32, and times 1.5 for retakes is $1.98. Take Ideogram 4.5 medium: $0.075 times 80 is $6.00, and with retakes $9.00. Any row in the table reproduces this way, so you can drop in your own slide count.

If your carousels have 10 slides instead of 8, scale every column by 1.25; if you make 30 a month instead of 10, scale by 3. Nothing else in the bill changes.

What Sume does and does not do here

Sume generates and returns the images as durable hosted files; it does not post the carousel to TikTok or lay the slides out for you. Reserve happens on submit at the rate above. Auto quality on GPT Image 2.5 reserves the max quality price, so send an explicit quality when you are budgeting, as the image docs note.

Image cost is also unaffected by how many slides you later keep. A rejected slide still bills if the job was accepted and completed, so the retake columns are the honest planning figure.

• Pick the cheapest quality that keeps the text readable on a phone.
• Send quality explicitly on GPT Image 2.5 so a budget is not reserved at max.
• Count regenerated slides as a second image, not as free.

Rerun the arithmetic

The same line items as a short script, so you can change a quantity and see the total. It is plain arithmetic on the rates in this post; it does not call the Sume API.

# Sume billable USD rates, read 2026-10-03. Edit the quantities.
lines = [
    ('GPT Image 2.5 medium slides', 80, 0.0165),
    ('Ideogram 4.5 medium slides', 80, 0.075),
]
total = 0.0
for label, qty, unit in lines:
    cost = qty * unit
    total += cost
    print(f"{label:<46}{qty:>8g} x {unit:<10g} = ${cost:,.2f}")
print(f"{'Total':<46}{'':>8}   {'':<10}   ${total:,.2f}")