The first editor I ever hired lasted nine days. He was talented. He was fast. He also could not tell the difference between a pause that needed cutting and a pause that was the best moment in the episode. On day nine he sent back a 42 minute cut of a conversation that had been genuinely funny, and it was not funny anymore. Every breath was gone. It sounded like a hostage statement.
That was my fault, not his. I hired for software skills when the job was actually a listening job.
If you are about to hire your first podcast editor, that is the one thing I want you to take away. You are not hiring someone to operate Premiere. You are hiring someone to make judgment calls about your show at three in the morning when you are asleep. The software is the easy part. Anyone can learn where the razor tool lives.
The signal that you are actually ready
Most hosts hire too late. A few hire too early.
Too early looks like this: you have published four episodes, your format is still moving, and you do not yet know what your show sounds like when it is good. If you hand that to someone else, you will spend more time writing feedback than you would have spent editing. You are outsourcing a decision you have not made yet.
Too late looks like the thing I see far more often. You are on episode 30. You have a backlog of three unedited recordings. You have started scheduling guests based on how much editing energy you have left, which means your show is now being planned around your worst constraint instead of your best opportunity. I wrote a whole piece about the moment editing stops being worth your time, and the honest summary is that it arrives about ten episodes before most people admit it.
The real signal is not episode count. It is this: when you sit down to edit, are you making the show better, or are you just making it exist? If it is the second one, you are doing data entry with a timeline.
What the job actually is
Here is the part that job descriptions get wrong. They list tools. Premiere, Resolve, Audition, Descript. Fine. Now list the actual decisions an editor makes on a single 60 minute episode:
- Which of the four times your guest explained the same idea is the version you keep
- Whether a 3 second silence is dead air or a person thinking, which are different sounds
- When your co-host talks over the guest, who wins
- Where the episode actually starts, which is almost never where you started recording
- Whether the tangent at minute 38 is a diversion or the whole point of the episode
Not one of those is a software question. Every one of them is a taste question, and taste is the thing you are paying for.
This is why I do not run silence detection as an editing method. It is a great way to produce a technically clean episode that nobody wants to finish. We watch the whole thing. It is slower and it is the only way I know to make cuts that a listener never notices.
The test of a good edit is not that it sounds edited. It is that a listener finishes the episode and could not tell you a single place where something was removed.
Freelancer, agency, or in house
Three options, and the honest trade is time, not money.
A freelancer is the cheapest per hour and the most expensive in attention. You will manage them. You will chase files. When they get a full time job or go on holiday, your show goes on holiday too. This works beautifully when you find the right person and it is genuinely painful when you do not, and you cannot tell which one you have for about six weeks.
A studio or agency costs more per episode and costs you almost nothing in management. Someone else handles the sick day. You get a fixed turnaround instead of a hopeful one. The trade is that you have less control over exactly who touches your file on a given week, which matters less than people expect once the style guide is written down.
An in house hire only makes sense when you are producing multiple shows a week or your editing is genuinely bespoke. Below that volume you are paying a salary for someone who is idle three days out of five.
For a weekly show with one or two hosts, I think the studio route wins on almost every axis except ego. That is not a neutral opinion and I am not pretending it is.
What it should cost, in real numbers
Vague pricing is how people get burned, so here is mine, plainly.
We charge $199 an episode for a Starter edit, which covers a single camera setup at 1080p with one round of revisions. That is the right fit for most solo and remote shows, and it is what I recommend to anyone doing single-camera shows who is hiring for the first time. Studio is $299 an episode and covers two to four cameras, 4K, and unlimited revisions. Both are priced up to 60 minutes. A 30 minute show costs less. A 90 minute show costs more.
First cut lands in 48 hours. Revisions come back the next working day. If you book a 4-episode pack you save 15 percent, and monthly saves 25 percent, because predictable work is genuinely cheaper for us to schedule and I would rather pass that on than pretend otherwise.
Add-ons are separate on purpose: vertical clips at $25 each, show notes and chapters at $35, rush 24-hour delivery at $75. You should be suspicious of anyone who bundles everything into one number, because it usually means you are paying for things you do not use.
If you are comparing quotes, compare turnaround and revision policy before you compare price. An editor who is $60 cheaper and takes eight days is not cheaper.
The trial that actually tells you something
Do not give a candidate your best episode. Give them your most awkward one.
The episode where the guest was nervous for the first ten minutes. The one where a phone rang. The one that ran 90 minutes and should have been 50. A good editor makes an easy episode sound fine. Only a good editor makes a difficult episode sound intentional.
Then look at three things in what comes back:
- Where they started the episode. If they kept your original cold open without questioning it, they were not really listening.
- What they cut that you would have kept. This is the interesting one. Disagreement here is information, not a red flag.
- How they handled the mess. Cross talk, background noise, a cough at the wrong moment. This is where audio cleanup skill shows up or does not.
Pay for the trial. A free test edit filters for people who are not busy, which is the opposite of what you want.
Onboarding, or how to not spend six months correcting the same note
The biggest cost of a new editor is not their rate. It is the first month of feedback loops. You compress that by writing things down once.
What I ask every new host for:
- Two episodes you are proud of, and one sentence on why for each
- One episode you are not proud of, same question
- Your rules on filler words. Some hosts want every "um" gone. Some think that flattens their personality. Both are correct, but you have to pick.
- How you want guest names, intros, and lower thirds handled. If you have not standardized this, templates versus custom graphics is worth an argument before episode one, not after episode twenty.
- Your delivery targets. YouTube, audio only, clips, or all three.
That last one changes the workflow more than anything else. If clips are part of the plan from the start, the editor marks them while watching instead of rewatching later, which is why clips are quoted per clip rather than as a vague content package.
If you are recording with several cameras, agree on the proxy and file handoff before the first shoot, not after. I have written about why proxy workflows matter on multi-cam shows and it is the single most common reason a first delivery slips.
The thing nobody warns you about
Once someone else edits your show, you will hear it differently.
For about three episodes you will notice every choice that is not yours. A transition you would have made softer. A laugh you would have kept. This is normal and it passes, and the way through it is to give specific notes instead of vibes. "Cut 40 seconds from the intro" is actionable. "It feels a bit slow" is not.
Also: batch your recordings. The moment you stop editing yourself, your bottleneck moves to recording, and most hosts do not adjust. There is a real way to record several episodes in one sitting without sounding stale, and it pairs with an outsourced edit better than anything else I have seen.
One more thing that surprises people. Your thumbnail becomes the constraint faster than your edit does, especially on YouTube. That is a separate craft, which is why our sister studio ClickTheory handles that side at 8 for $250 instead of us pretending an editor is also a designer.
What I would do if I were starting over
Hire on taste. Test on your worst episode. Pay for the trial. Write down your rules before the first delivery, not after the third argument. And judge the relationship at four episodes, not one, because the first edit from anyone is always the roughest.
I am in Dubai and we work with hosts everywhere, mostly remote, mostly async. If you want a second opinion on your specific setup before you hire anyone, including us, send me the show at samy@pixelsamy.com and I will tell you honestly whether you need an editor yet.