Introduction

Sume API went live on October 22 from Sume Labs: one key and one balance for a big catalog of hosted image, video, lip-sync and caption models, billed at what Sume says is the provider's own price with 0% markup. It's closed and hosted, not open weights. You can use it today through a REST API at api.sume.com, a hosted MCP server for Claude, Cursor and Codex, or a Higgsfield-style web studio.

Founder David Im's launch post went straight at the middlemen: he says routing layers mark up the same models by 40% (Higgsfield's API at its best discount), 100% (fal) and 414% (Runway on Seedance 2 480p). Those are Sume's numbers, not ours. What we can check is the pricing page Sume published, and on Seedance in particular the gap is real money.

What Shipped

  • Who: Sume Labs, whose main product is an AI ad-creative studio. The API is the routing layer under it, now opened up.
  • What: pay-as-you-go access to dozens of image and video models, including Seedance 2.5 and 2.0, MiniMax H3 and H3 Max, Kling 3.0, Wan 3.0, Veo 3.1, Grok Imagine Video 1.5, Nano Banana Pro and 2.1, Seedream 5.0, Ideogram 4.5 and GPT Image 2, plus lip-sync and caption models.
  • Billing: one US-dollar balance with no subscription. Sume says top-ups last 365 days, it pays the card fee, and failed generations are refunded.
  • Surfaces: REST, the hosted MCP endpoint https://mcp.sume.com/mcp with a dry_run price preview, a web studio, and a CLI that so far covers mainly Sume's Avatar models.

The Prices Worth Knowing

These are per-second and per-image rates from Sume's pricing page, set against the fal and Higgsfield prices Sume lists next to them:

  • Seedance 2.5, 1080p: $0.5686/s on Sume, vs $1.1640/s (fal) and $1.1373/s (Higgsfield)
  • Seedance 2.5, 720p: $0.2312/s, vs $0.4730/s (fal) and $0.4622/s (Higgsfield)
  • Seedance 2.5, 480p: $0.1028/s, vs $0.2205/s (fal)
  • MiniMax H3 Max, 1080p: $0.10/s, vs $0.16/s (fal)
  • Ideogram 4.5, 2K high: $0.10/image, vs $0.22 (fal)
  • Nano Banana Pro, 4K: $0.24/image, vs $0.30 (fal)
  • Seedream 5.0 Pro, 1K: $0.045/image, vs $0.0675 (fal)

Now the plot twist. A lot of the catalog costs exactly the same as fal: Kling 3.0, Veo 3.1, Wan 3.0, Grok Imagine Video 1.5 and several MiniMax H3 tiers are listed at identical rates. So "0% markup" pays off most on ByteDance's Seedance family and a few image models, not across the board. Check the model you actually use before you move your whole pipeline.

Try It Yourself

The video endpoint takes one JSON body per job, then you poll the job (or pass a webhook) until it finishes. Here's a cheap 480p Seedance 2.5 test using the field names from Sume's docs:

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: $(uuidgen)" \
  -d '{
    "model": "seedance-2.5",
    "prompt": "A paper lantern drifts over a rain-slick night market, slow push-in, warm gold light",
    "duration": 5,
    "resolution": "480p",
    "aspect_ratio": "16:9"
  }'

At the listed 480p rate, that five-second clip comes to about $0.51. Sume's docs say Seedance 2.5 runs 4 to 30 seconds with native audio, and the same router takes image_url, reference_image_urls (1–10) and reference_video_urls (1–5) on models that accept them.

Original Source

Pricing: sume.com/api · Docs: sume.com/docs

Conclusion

Price wars are lovely for makers, as long as you read the fine print. Sume's pitch is bold and its Seedance numbers hold up on its own rate card, while plenty of other models cost the same as anywhere else. The open questions are the usual ones for any new router: uptime, queue times at launch, and whether the gap survives once fal and friends respond. If Seedance 2.5 is your daily driver, a handful of 480p test clips is a cheap way to find out.

—Aurelia ♡