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← Short-Form Video Editing

Part 1 · Is this real? · Lesson 2 of 13

What it really costs

The money cost is close to nothing, which is the problem. The real cost is hours, and most people never measure theirs.

9 cards · 3 min

The money is the short part

You can begin this with a computer you already own and software that has a free tier. That is not a trick or a teaser — it is genuinely how the first month works.

What it costs to start

Editing software, free tier
$0
Platform accounts to study and post from
$0
A computer or phone you already own
$0
A portfolio page on a free site builder
$0
A shared folder for client footage, free tier
$0
Storage for raw footage, once free tiers fill
Priced by capacity
Music library subscription, only for off-platform delivery
Billed monthly
Paid editing tier, only when the free one blocks a delivery
Billed monthly
A faster machine, only when renders are costing you hours
One-time, priced by spec

Checked 2026-08-31. Rows without a figure are deliberate. Those prices are set by other companies, they change without telling us, and a number printed here would be wrong by the time you read it. Open the provider's own pricing page and look at today's number before you commit to anything recurring.

Every paid row is conditional

Read the bottom four rows again. 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 far longer than the finished thirty seconds suggests, and almost none of that time is cutting. 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.

Where the hours go

  • 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 normal and healthy.
  • Chasing. Asking a client for footage they promised on Monday is unpaid labour that recurs every month.
  • Exports and re-exports. Wrong aspect ratio, wrong loudness, caption clipped by a platform button — each one is a full render again.

Slow hardware is not free

First, measure

  1. Time three complete edits, end to end, including the watch-through and the export. Take the middle number, not the best one.
  2. Add a fixed revision allowance to each — start with half of one edit's time.
  3. Add an admin allowance per client per month for chasing footage, delivering and invoicing.

Then, the arithmetic

  1. Decide the hourly figure below which you would rather do something else. That is your floor. Nobody sets it for you.
  2. Multiply your timing by your floor. If an edit takes 90 minutes and your floor is $30 an hour, that edit costs you $45 to produce. That is cost, not price.
  3. Any monthly fee below your cost per edit multiplied by the number of edits is a fee that pays you to lose time.

What that number tells you

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