What It Actually Costs to Produce 100 Videos a Month

One hundred videos a month is five a day, five days a week. It’s a normal number for an agency with six clients, a media team running three shows, or a creator with a clipping operation behind them.

It’s also where the math stops being obvious. Below 30 a month, most people just do it themselves. Above 100, most people have already hired. In between is where the spreadsheet gets opened.

Here’s what the options actually cost, including the parts that never show up on an invoice.

Option 1: Offshore editors

The default move. Rates run $25–50 per short-form video depending on region, complexity, and how long you’ve worked together. Turnaround is typically five to seven days from footage handoff to first draft.

At 100 videos a month, that’s $2,500–5,000.

That’s the number people quote. Here’s the rest of it:

Hidden cost	Realistic impact
Timezone lag	12–24h per round trip on any question. Two questions on a video adds two days.
Revision rounds	1.5–2.5 rounds average on a new editor, settling to ~1 after three months. Each round is a fresh handoff.
Onboarding	10–20 hours of your time per editor to teach brand, pacing, caption style, what a good hook looks like.
Quality variance	Video 40 doesn’t look like video 12. Someone has to catch that.
Turnover	Editors leave. Annual churn on contract editors is high, and every departure resets the onboarding cost.

Loaded up, offshore editing at 100/month runs closer to $3,500–6,500 in cash plus 15–25 hours a month of internal coordination. That coordination is not junior work. It’s usually the person who knows what good looks like.

To be fair: this option is genuinely good when the work is repetitive and the spec is stable. An editor who’s cut 400 videos for you is a real asset and hard to replace with anything.

Option 2: In-house junior or assistant editor

A junior editor in the US runs $50–70k base. Loaded with payroll taxes, benefits, software, and hardware, call it $65–90k all-in, or $5,400–7,500/month.

What do you get for it? Capacity is the honest constraint. A junior editor producing brand-consistent short-form from raw footage realistically finishes 6–12 videos per week once you account for meetings, revisions, and the fact that some days the footage is a mess. That’s 25–50 a month.

So at 100 videos a month, one junior editor covers a third to a half of the load. You are looking at two hires, or one hire plus contractors.

Worth pricing separately: the selects and string-out pass. Contract that step alone, meaning someone watches the raw footage, pulls the usable takes, and organizes them into a rough sequence, and it runs $250–400 per project. Agencies contract this out precisely because it’s the least creative and most time-consuming part of the job. At even 20 projects a month, that’s $5,000–8,000 for work that produces nothing publishable.

Option 3: The content lead does it themselves

Nobody budgets this one. Everybody uses it.

The head of content, the agency owner, the person who was supposed to be selling. They open the timeline at 9pm because the batch has to go out Monday.

Price it honestly. If that person’s fully-loaded cost is $120k, their hour is roughly $75. A short-form video from raw footage, cut by someone who already knows exactly what they want, takes 45–90 minutes including the sorting step.

Videos/month	Hours	Direct cost at $75/hr
25	19–38	$1,400–2,800
50	38–75	$2,800–5,600
100	75–150	$5,600–11,300

The direct cost is the smaller half. The real cost is that 75–150 hours is half to all of a full-time role, taken out of the person whose job is client acquisition, strategy, or hiring. That’s the opportunity cost, and it compounds: the reason you haven’t hired is that you don’t have time to hire.

Option 4: Tooling

Clipping tools headline at $15–70/month. Opus Clip, Submagic, Captions, and the rest sit in that band. At 100 videos a month the headline number is not the number you pay.

Two reasons. First, credits: plans are metered in upload minutes or processing credits, and a 100-video month usually means 20–60 hours of source footage, which pushes most users to the top tier or into overage. Second, add-ons are frequently separate lines: extra seats, higher-res exports, brand kits.

Realistic all-in at this volume: $100–400/month, sometimes more. Overlap prices honestly for the segment at roughly $250–1,000/month and gates access behind a demo.

But the cost that matters isn’t the subscription. These tools take a finished file and produce clips from it. They do nothing about the raw footage sitting in a folder before the finished file exists. If your bottleneck is “we shot six hours across four concepts and nobody has sorted it,” a clipping tool doesn’t touch that. Neither does Descript, which is excellent and works one file at a time. Eddie AI gets closer, raw to one rough cut, but it hands off to a professional editor rather than producing finished output at volume.

The cost nobody counts: the creative director’s time

This is the line that decides the calculation, and it’s never in the spreadsheet.

For every video, someone briefs it, reviews the draft, and re-briefs the parts that came back wrong. Call it:

Step	Time per video
Brief (what this is, which angle, which hook)	5–10 min
Review draft	5–8 min
Re-brief / revision notes	5–15 min
Second review	3–5 min

That’s 18–38 minutes per video of senior time, and it is remarkably stable across every option above. At 100 videos a month: 30–63 hours. At $75–100/hour, that’s $2,250–6,300/month of direction, on top of whatever you paid to have the video cut.

Now the objection. Every AI video tool runs into the same one: “I have to explain what I want either way, so what have I saved?”

It’s a fair objection and the honest answer is about persistence, not intelligence.

With a person, the brief resets. Not fully, a good editor learns, but it resets on every new hire, every new client, every new format, and partially on every video where the reference is different. You are re-explaining pacing and caption style at some fraction of full cost, forever, and at 100% cost every time someone leaves.

With a system, the explanation persists. You define the pacing, hook structure, caption style, and title cards once, and they apply to video 1 and video 400 identically. The direction cost is front-loaded rather than recurring.

This is the part Clik is actually built around: it learns a team’s style and applies it across everything, and it starts from the raw batch, sorting an undifferentiated folder into separate projects, plans each one, and builds them. You never sort a file. The selects pass you were paying $250–400 for stops being a line item.

That doesn’t make the human option wrong. For hero work, brand films, anything where the edit is the idea, hire the editor. The calculation here is about volume work where the format is known and the variable is footage.

How to calculate your own number

Do this on one page. Take last month.

1. Cash out. Editor invoices, salary allocation, tool subscriptions including overages.
2. Senior hours. Briefing, reviewing, re-briefing. Multiply by fully-loaded hourly rate. Be honest, count evenings.
3. Coordination hours. Handoffs, chasing files, re-explaining, quality checks.
4. Sorting hours. Time spent between “footage exists” and “someone can start editing.” This is usually the number that surprises people.
5. Divide by videos actually published. Not videos produced. Published.

That’s your real cost per finished video. Most teams at this volume land between $80 and $220, well above the $25–50 invoice they thought they were paying.

Then set your threshold before you shop. If you know that anything under $X per finished video, at your quality bar, justifies a change, you’ll evaluate options in an afternoon instead of a quarter. Without that number, every demo looks equally plausible and you’ll keep doing it yourself at 9pm.

Run last month’s numbers. If sorting and briefing are your two biggest lines, that’s what Clik was built to remove.