Today we launched Sume API with a 0% markup, which means you get the same models at exactly the price the original model provider charges. A lot of people have asked me why we'd do something that sounds this irrational, and the answer is that the AI video industry has been broken for a while, and I think the margin everyone is fighting over right now is going to disappear anyway.
The industry is broken
For instance, Seedance 2.0 at 480p : Runway adds 414%, fal adds 100%, and Higgsfield's API adds 40% even after its maximum advertised discount. None of these companies trained Seedance. They take your request, forward it to ByteDance and send the video back to you, and for that simple routing job you end up paying anywhere from 1.4x to 5x the original price. That isn't a business built on the value it creates, it's a business built on the assumption that most people won't check.
There is no moat in AI video model wrappers
AI video is one of the biggest markets in tech right now. Higgsfield crossed a $1B annualized run rate in September, Runway hit $200M ARR the same month, and OpenArt says it's already close to $200M ARR. But when you look closely, the whole space is a marketing fight with no real moat underneath it. Every company offers the same models, and every app has converged on the same UI, a prompt box, a model dropdown and a gallery of templates, so people end up using a particular app simply because it's the one they've heard of. Even more, started to generate straight from their own agents like Claude or ChatGPT through MCP. Once the interface disappears, the only thing left to compete on is mindshare (= marketing).
We saw this firsthand with our own customers. When we showed Sume to teams that had been using Higgsfield, they migrated right away, without any friction and without the usual "but we're used to the other tool." When switching costs are that close to zero, what a company has isn't a moat but an ad budget.
Sume's UI of the image generation part. Every feature in Higgsfield, easily included.
No moat means it becomes a commodity
A business without a moat eventually gets commoditized, and the only real question is when. Peter Thiel put it plainly in Zero to One:
"Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit."
When everyone sells the same thing, price competition keeps dragging the price down until it reaches cost. Every new router that resells the same models pushes the supply curve further to the right, and the markup that the early players enjoyed gets competed away until almost nothing is left.
That's why I think every company fighting over routing margin is going to lose that fight, because nobody gets to keep a profit in a market shaped like this. The company that wins will be the one that deliberately gives this layer away at cost and captures its value somewhere else, somewhere it can actually own.
Workflow is the only moat
If routing isn't the moat, the moat has to live in the application layer, in the product that owns the customer's workflow. A customer doesn't leave a product once it's woven into how their whole company operates, and that's especially true when the company's own context lives inside it: its brand guidelines, its past campaigns, and its record of what performed and what didn't. Leaving at that point means rebuilding the way the company works. We also found something we didn't expect while working with our customers. AI didn't just change how brands and agencies produce ads, it changed how they're organized, with teams restructured and roles redefined around the new workflow, so the product ends up becoming part of the org chart itself. That's a kind of lock-in a model dropdown will never have.
Sume's plan
Our plan has two phases. In the first, we give away everything Higgsfield offers at its original cost with a 0% markup, and in the second, we release to the public the product we've built to cover the entire workflow. The first phase started today with Sume API, and from here on we'll launch one Higgsfield feature every week, at cost, so stay tuned. For the second phase, we've spent the last six months running an enterprise beta with brands and agencies, and through it we built a product that covers the entire AI ad production workflow, from finding trends to storyboarding, producing, posting and optimizing. It's coming very soon.
There is no winner in a competitive market
There is no winner in a competitive market, so we're ending the competition at the layer that doesn't matter and building where it does.
Higgsfield, watch me kill you.
Pricing notes: Seedance 2.0 text-to-video, 480p, 16:9, 24fps, no video input. Public standard API list prices checked October 20, 2026 (BytePlus ModelArk, fal, Runway, Higgsfield API). Runway is $0.36/sec, about $1.80 for 5 seconds vs. about $0.35 at the provider's price. Revenue figures are as reported: Higgsfield's run rate is company-reported (Bloomberg, Sept 24, 2026), Runway ARR per Bloomberg (Sept 8, 2026), Kling's run rate per SCMP (Jan 14, 2026).
