Video Editing Cost Calculator
agency, freelance and in-house, side by side

The agency figure assumes managed delivery: briefing, hook selection, two revision rounds and a delivery pack. The freelance figure is invoice only — add four to eight hours a week of your own coordination time at your loaded rate to compare fairly. The in-house figure is salary plus payroll, software and amortised hardware.

Where the three numbers land close together, the deciding factor is not cost but risk and context: who covers holidays, who owns brand knowledge, and who decides what gets made.

Filming, media spend, talent fees and travel are excluded because they vary far more than editing does and would swamp the comparison. So is the value of your own time, which you should add manually — it is usually the largest hidden line in the freelance column.

Treat the output as a planning range, not a quote. Real pricing depends on footage quality, cut density and how much strategy sits inside the scope.

The agency total covers editing, captions, sound, exports, cover frames, two revision rounds per asset and monthly reporting. It excludes filming, paid distribution, licensed music and talent fees — costs that exist regardless of who edits.

The freelance total uses per-asset market rates and deliberately does not include your own management time. On a twenty-asset month, briefing, chasing, reviewing and re-briefing typically consumes five to eight hours of someone internal. Price that time at your own loaded rate and add it before comparing.

The in-house total is loaded: salary, employer costs, software, hardware amortisation and a share of management overhead. It steps up above twenty-five shorts a month because that is roughly where one editor stops being able to absorb the volume alongside revisions.

Freelance wins on low, irregular volume — under about six assets a month, the coordination overhead of a retainer is not repaid.

In-house wins on high volume with a stable format and a real content lead to manage it. Above roughly thirty assets a month with predictable structure, the per-asset cost is hard to beat.

A retainer wins in the middle band, which is where most businesses sit: enough volume that consistency matters, not enough to justify a salaried hire, and no internal capacity to manage a roster of freelancers.

These bands are about structure, not quality. Excellent and poor work exists in all three models.

Rework caused by unclear briefs. This is the largest hidden cost in every model and it is a process problem rather than a pricing one.

The cost of inconsistency. A month with no publishing does not just lose that month's reach; on most surfaces it also reduces distribution on the return.

Opportunity cost of founder time. Founders who edit their own content usually value the hour at zero when planning and at several hundred dollars when reviewing the month.