What it really costs

Start with the money, because it is the short part. You can begin this with a computer you already own and software that has a free tier, and that is not a trick — it is genuinely how the first month works.

Read the bottom four rows again. Every one of them is conditional. The mistake is buying them on day one because buying feels like progress. Nothing in the bottom half of that table makes your first edit better. Buy each one at the moment it is blocking a delivery you have already been paid for, and not before.

The cost that actually bites

Your hours. A first edit takes a beginner far longer than the finished thirty seconds suggests, and almost none of that time is the cutting. It goes on watching footage you have already watched, hunting for a sound, fixing captions that drifted out of sync, exporting the wrong shape and exporting again. That time is invisible until you measure it, and if you never measure it you will price your work at a number that quietly loses money and you will not know why the months feel bad.

• Transfer time. Moving a folder of phone video is not instant, and it happens before you can start.
• The watch-through. Non-negotiable, and it scales with how much they sent, not with how long the finished video is.
• Revisions. Budget them as part of the job, not as an accident. Two rounds is a normal, healthy number.
• Chasing. Asking a client for the footage they promised on Monday is unpaid labour that recurs every single month.
• Exports and re-exports. Wrong aspect ratio, wrong loudness, caption clipped by a platform button — each one is a full render again.

The arithmetic, with your own numbers in it

Here is the shape of the calculation. The numbers below are placeholders for yours, not claims about what anything costs or pays.

1. 1Time three complete edits, end to end, including the watch-through and the export. Take the middle number, not the best one.
2. 2Add a fixed allowance for revisions on each — start with half of one edit's time.
3. 3Add an admin allowance per client per month for chasing footage, delivering, and invoicing.
4. 4Decide the hourly figure below which you would rather do something else. That is your floor. It is yours to pick; nobody sets it for you.
5. 5Multiply your timing by your floor. If an edit takes you 90 minutes and your floor is $30 an hour, that edit costs you $45 to produce. That is cost, not price.
6. 6Any monthly fee that works out below your cost per edit multiplied by the number of edits is a fee that pays you to lose time.

Do that once and you will never again quote a number by feel. It also tells you something more valuable than a price: whether getting faster is worth more to you than getting more clients. Early on, it usually is.