Pricing, transparently

Four variables account for almost all of the difference between a two thousand dollar month and a ten thousand dollar month: volume, format mix, complexity, and turnaround. Volume is straightforward, thirty shorts costs more than fifteen. Format mix matters more than people expect, because a long-form YouTube episode with chapters, motion graphics, and a designed thumbnail can absorb as much editor time as eight short-form clips.

Complexity covers motion design, multi-camera sync, licensed music, colour matching across mixed cameras, and compliance review layers. Turnaround is the multiplier people forget: a forty-eight hour standard is priced differently from a same-day rush, because rush work displaces scheduled work. The cost pages linked in this hub break each of those down with real ranges rather than a single number.

Per-video pricing is honest for one-off projects and expensive for ongoing programs, because every video restarts the briefing, style-matching, and approval overhead. Retainers amortize that overhead, which is why the effective cost per deliverable drops sharply once you are producing more than roughly eight to ten videos a month.

An in-house editor looks cheaper on a salary line and rarely is once you add payroll taxes, software licenses, hardware, storage, recruiting cost, and the fact that one person cannot cover short-form, long-form, motion design, thumbnails, and holiday coverage. The in-house editor cost page runs the full loaded comparison. The right answer genuinely depends on your volume, and we will tell you when hiring is the better call.

Tiers start at two thousand four hundred ninety five dollars per month for fifteen short-form deliverables and scale to three thousand nine hundred ninety five dollars per month for thirty shorts plus long-form support. Every tier includes research and clip selection, scripting or structuring where relevant, the edit itself, burned-in brand-styled captions, sound design and loudness mastering, thumbnails where the format calls for one, two revision rounds per deliverable, weekday support, and monthly reporting.

There are no per-project invoices, no charge for the briefing call, and no separate line item for captions or uploading. If a month runs light, unused deliverables roll once. If your needs change, tiers move up or down at the next billing cycle rather than locking you into an annual commitment.

Ask four questions of any proposal. How many revision rounds are included and what counts as a round. Who owns the project files and can you get the source timelines. What is the guaranteed turnaround and what happens when it is missed. Is the editor who produced the sample the editor who will do your work, or is the sample a portfolio piece from someone senior and the work goes to a junior.

A quote that is dramatically below the market band almost always answers one of those four questions badly. That is not always disqualifying, cheap and fast can be correct for high-volume testing on paid social, but you should know which trade you are making before you sign rather than discovering it in month two.

The retainer is rarely the whole cost. Budget for recording time, which is the hidden line item in every content plan: two hours of your own or your founder's time each month is a real expense even though nobody invoices you for it. Add hardware if you are starting from nothing — a camera or good phone rig, a lav or USB microphone, and a light will cover most needs for a few hundred dollars, once.

Then account for internal approval time. A programme with one empowered approver costs almost nothing in overhead. A programme with a three-person committee costs real money in delay, missed publish dates and extra revision rounds, and it is worth fixing that before you increase spend on production.

Increasing volume returns more when you already have a proven format and the bottleneck is simply how many pieces you can publish. It returns very little when you are still guessing at what works, because you are just producing more of something unvalidated and paying to distribute it.

The sequence that tends to work is: start at a volume you can sustain, spend two to three months finding the format that holds attention, then increase volume against the proven winner. Brands that invert that order — buying the largest tier before knowing what to make — typically get a busy calendar and a flat pipeline, and then conclude that video does not work for them.