Pricing
What an explainer video costs — agency, freelancer, software, or yourself
Most pages that answer this are written by the companies quoting you. This one is written by a company selling the cheap end, which is its own bias — so every number below is attributed to the source that published it, and the section on when an agency is worth the money is the one to read if you are deciding between the two.
Published 10 September 2026 · 11 min read · every figure read off its source on 10 September 2026
The short version
There are four ways to get an explainer video made, and their prices are not on the same scale. They are not four grades of the same product either — the cheap one is not a worse version of the expensive one, it is a different thing.
| Route | 60 seconds | Time | What you are actually buying |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premium agency | $7,000–$25,000+ | 4–8 weeks | Original creative direction, custom characters, an account team, and somebody whose job it is to be accountable. |
| Mid-market studio | $3,500–$7,000 | 3–4 weeks | A written narrative, original illustration, a voice actor, two revision rounds. |
| Freelancer | $2,000–$3,000 | 1–3 weeks | One person’s craft and taste. No account management, and no cover if they get ill. |
| Template studio | $500–$2,000 | 1–2 weeks | Your script and logo in a layout they have shipped before. |
| Software you drive | €3–$99 | Minutes | The video, and none of the people. This is where we are — see where we fit. |
The gap between the bottom row and the top is roughly 8,000×, and that is not a mistake in either direction. What changes across it is how much human judgement went into the thing, and whether the judgement was yours or somebody you paid.
What 45 agencies quoted for one real brief
The most useful number in this trade is not a published rate card, because most agencies do not publish one. It is what they quote when a real brief lands in the inbox.
In 2026 Squideo — itself a video agency — wrote one genuine 30-second animated explainer brief and sent it to more than a hundred agencies across the UK, US, Europe and Canada. Forty-five answered. Their published result, updated 2 September 2026:
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Average quote | £2,960 for 30 seconds |
| Full range | £296 to £20,000+ |
| Most common band | £2,000–£5,000 |
| Sample | 45 responses from 100+ agencies contacted |
One caveat worth stating plainly: the survey was run and published by an agency that competes in this market, the same way this article is written by a company selling software into it. The methodology is disclosed and the sample is real, which is more than most figures in this category can claim, but it is not neutral ground and neither is this page.
The prices agencies publish themselves
A minority put numbers on their own site. Those are worth more than any aggregated range, because a published price is one the company has to honour. All three below were read on 10 September 2026.
| Company | Published price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Magic Motion Studio Standard | $2,500 | 60 seconds. Script, design, animation, sound design, voiceover, 2 revision rounds. 3–4 weeks. |
| Magic Motion Studio Pro | $5,000 | 60–90 seconds. Adds social resizes, cutdowns, stills, source files, 5 revision rounds. |
| MyPromoVideos | From $5,000 | 60-second 2D animated explainer. Motion graphics from $4,500; mixed-style 60–90s from $7,000; 3D product animation from $8,000. |
| Gisteo | $3,000–$8,000+ | Traditional custom animation. Their AI avatar tier starts around $1,000 and AI cinematic around $3,500. |
| ExplainVids | €3 | One finished video, up to two minutes. No subscription, no watermark, commercial use included. |
Gisteo’s middle tier is the interesting line in that table. An established animation studio now sells an AI-assisted video at roughly $1,000 — a third of its custom rate — which is the clearest signal available that the floor under this market has moved and the studios know it.
The four tiers, and what separates them
MyPromoVideos publishes the cleanest tier breakdown of the agencies we read, updated 6 August 2026. It matches the shape of the Squideo spread closely enough to be worth reproducing.
| Tier | 60 seconds | Typically bought for |
|---|---|---|
| Template studios | $500–$2,000 | Internal communications |
| Mid-market B2B studios | $3,500–$7,000 | Homepage heroes, product launches |
| Premium B2B agencies | $7,000–$15,000 | Enterprise launches, complex technical products |
| US/UK premium agencies | $15,000–$25,000+ | Fortune 500 campaigns |
What moves you up a tier is rarely the animation. It is the amount of strategy in front of it — audience research, message testing, a narrative someone argued about — and the amount of insurance behind it: contracts, indemnities, an account manager who answers on a Friday, and a team that can absorb one person leaving.
Freelancers
A freelance animator is the middle route: most of the craft of a studio, none of the overhead, and none of the redundancy. Project rates for a 60-second explainer cluster around $2,000–$3,000, with experienced motion designers working from direct clients charging considerably more than marketplace medians suggest.
The trade-off that actually matters with a freelancer is not price, it is continuity. One person is a single point of failure for six weeks, and the second video — the one you need in four months, in the same style — depends on them still being available and still having the project files.
Software and AI tools
Below the freelance floor the market stops being priced per video and starts being priced per month, and the numbers drop by two orders of magnitude: roughly $15 to $99 a month for the subscription tools, or a few euros for a single finished video where a tool sells them that way.
Which of those tools to use is a different question from what a video costs, and it has its own page: explainer video software compared puts eleven of them side by side with every price read off the vendor’s own page, and works out what one finished video costs on each. The short version is that they are four different products wearing one name — avatar tools, stock-footage assemblers, drag-and-drop studios, and generators — and the cheapest one that does the wrong thing is not a saving.
Cost per minute, and why the unit misleads
“Cost per minute” is the phrase everyone searches and almost nobody in production uses, because the costs are not distributed along the timeline. Working the tiers above back to a per-minute figure gives roughly $2,500–$8,000 per finished minute in the mid-market and $15,000+ at the premium end — but the unit hides the thing you need to know when you brief.
Script, storyboard, style frames, casting, direction and the revision rounds cost about the same whether the film runs 45 seconds or 90. Only the animation and the voice scale with length. So:
- A 30-second video is not half the price of a 60-second one. Squideo’s 30-second brief averaged £2,960 — squarely inside the 60-second bands everyone else publishes.
- A two-minute video is usually 1.3–1.6× a one-minute one, not 2×. If you are close to the line, the extra thirty seconds is the cheapest thing on the invoice.
- Three 40-second videos cost far more than one two-minute video, because you pay the fixed half three times. This is exactly backwards from software, where each additional video is the only thing you pay for.
What the money actually buys
The gap between $3 and $5,000 looks absurd until you list what is in the invoice. Almost none of it is animation.
| What you are paying for | Software equivalent | Honest assessment |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery and messaging | None | Nothing automated does this. If you do not know what the video should say, no tool will decide for you. |
| Scriptwriting | Generated, editable | Genuinely close for a straightforward product. Not close for a narrative that has to land emotionally. |
| Original illustration | A fixed library | Not equivalent, and pretending otherwise is the lie in this category. A library is a library. |
| Animation | Automated | The closest match of anything on this list. Timing to the narration is now routine. |
| Voice | Synthetic | Good enough that most viewers do not notice. A trained actor still reads a joke better. |
| Revisions | Re-render | Software wins outright. Two rounds and three weeks versus editing a line and rendering again. |
| Accountability | None | You cannot sue a render farm because the video underperformed. For some budgets that alone is the reason to hire people. |
When an agency is worth every pound of it
This is the section a software company is not supposed to write, so here it is plainly. Hire a studio or an agency when:
- The video is the first thing a serious buyer sees. A homepage hero for a funded product, watched by thousands of prospects over two years. $5,000 amortised across that is nothing, and looking cheap on that surface is expensive.
- The message has to be discovered, not transcribed. If nobody in the company can yet say what the product does in three sentences, you are buying strategy and the video is the artefact it comes wrapped in.
- You need characters, a story, or a brand world. Original character design is not something any generator does, including this one.
- Somebody has to be accountable to a board. Contracts, indemnities, usage rights and a named producer are part of what the fee buys.
Do not hire one when:
- You need twelve videos, not one. Per-video economics invert completely at volume, and an agency retainer for a feature-explainer library is the most expensive way to solve that problem.
- The content dates. A video about this quarter’s pricing should not cost four weeks and $5,000.
- You are testing whether video works for you at all. Find that out for €3 first — that is a genuinely better use of the money than a discovery workshop.
Where ExplainVids fits, and where it does not
We sell the bottom row of the first table: €3 for one finished video, no subscription, up to two minutes. You type what the video should explain — or paste a URL and we read the page — and about two minutes later there is a narrated film with motion graphics, burned-in captions and a real voice, in vertical or widescreen.
What that gets right
- Volume and iteration. Ten videos costs €29. Changing your mind costs a re-render, not a revision round.
- Speed. Minutes against weeks. For anything time-sensitive this is the only difference that matters.
- Your numbers, not invented ones. Charts are drawn only from figures you supplied. A brief with no numbers in it produces no data scenes rather than plausible fabricated ones — which is not true of every tool in this category.
What it does not do
- Original character design. The illustrations come from a fixed library. They are good and they are not yours.
- Strategy. It writes a script from your brief. It does not work out what your product is for.
- A brand film with a human voice actor. If the video is the company’s face for two years, hire the people. We are not trying to be that, and a tool that claims to be is one to be careful with.
If you are collecting agency quotes this week, make one of these first. Three euros and two minutes is a cheaper way to find out what you actually want the video to say than a discovery call — and the quotes read differently once you have seen a version of it.
Make one and seeQuestions
How much does an explainer video cost?
For a custom animated explainer from a production company, roughly $2,500 to $15,000 for 60 seconds, depending on the tier you hire. Squideo put one real 30-second brief to over 100 agencies in 2026 and the 45 that answered averaged £2,960, with quotes running from £296 to over £20,000. Freelancers are usually $2,000 to $3,000 for the same 60 seconds. Software is two to three orders of magnitude below all of it — single videos from about €3, subscriptions from roughly $15 to $99 a month.
How much does an explainer video cost per minute?
Studios quote per project rather than per minute, but the arithmetic works out around $2,500 to $8,000 per finished minute in the mid-market and $15,000 or more at the premium end. Per-minute is a misleading unit in this trade: the script, the storyboard, the design pass and the revision rounds cost roughly the same whether the video runs 45 seconds or 90, so a two-minute video is rarely twice the price of a one-minute one.
Why are explainer videos so expensive?
Almost none of the money is animation. A custom explainer is a scriptwriter, a storyboard artist, an illustrator, an animator, a voice actor, a sound designer and a producer coordinating them, plus two or three rounds of client revisions that each restart part of the chain. You are buying about four to six weeks of several people's attention. The animation itself is the last and shortest step.
What is the cheapest way to make an explainer video?
Software you drive yourself, and within that, paying per video rather than by the month if you need fewer than about four a year. A single ExplainVids video is €3 with no subscription. The genuinely free options are not free in the way they sound: free tiers carry a watermark, a length cap, or both, and a watermarked video is not usable on a homepage.
Is an explainer video worth the money?
It depends entirely on what the video has to carry. A homepage hero video for a funded product, judged by thousands of prospects and used for two years, justifies an agency: you are buying a narrative, original design and somebody accountable for the result. A video explaining one feature to existing customers, replaced next quarter, does not — that money is better spent making ten of them.
How long does an explainer video take to produce?
Agencies quote three to four weeks for a 60-second custom animation, and that is the honest figure rather than a padded one — script approval and revision rounds are client-side waiting as much as studio-side work. Freelancers run one to three weeks. Software is minutes, which is the actual difference between the two routes rather than the price.
Do explainer video companies publish their prices?
A minority do, and it is worth using them as anchors. Magic Motion Studio publishes $2,500 for a 60-second standard package and $5,000 for its pro tier; MyPromoVideos publishes from $5,000 for a 60-second 2D explainer and from $4,500 for motion graphics; Gisteo publishes roughly $3,000 to $8,000 for traditional custom animation. Most agencies quote per brief instead, which is why the survey data matters.
How these prices were checked
Every figure was read off the source’s own page on 10 September 2026 and attributed where it appears, rather than gathered into an unsourced range. The four sources are Squideo’s 45-agency survey, Magic Motion Studio’s pricing page, MyPromoVideos’ pricing guide and Gisteo’s services pricing. Three of the four are agencies publishing about their own market, which is worth holding in mind — as is the fact that this page is published by a company selling the cheapest option on it.
The freelance figures are the one place there is no single citable rate card: they are the consistent range across marketplace guides and industry surveys rather than one company’s published price, and they are stated as a range for that reason.
Prices move and pages like this rot quietly. If you are reading well after 10 September 2026, treat the shape as durable and check the two or three numbers you are about to act on.