Last month a host emailed me a spreadsheet of six editing quotes. The spread was insane. The cheapest was $40 an episode. The most expensive was $1,400. Same show, same runtime, same two cameras, same guest format. Nobody could explain the gap, least of all the agencies quoting it.
I have been on the selling side of that spreadsheet for years, so let me just tell you how the number actually gets made. Not the marketing version. The version where somebody sits down with a calculator and decides what a week of their team's attention is worth.
The number is almost never about the editing
Here is the thing that surprises people: the raw act of cutting a 60 minute conversation is the most predictable part of the job. A good editor knows roughly how long it takes. The variance in agency pricing does not come from the cut. It comes from everything wrapped around it.
Revision policy. Turnaround guarantees. Who reviews the work before it reaches you. Whether a human watched the whole thing or a script found the silences and called it a day. Whether someone is paid to remember that your co-host always says "so anyway" before a good point and that the point starts after it.
Two agencies can charge triple the difference and both be honest, because they are selling different amounts of human attention. The price tag is a proxy for how many times a person looked at your episode.
When I quote, I am mostly pricing risk and attention, not minutes. That is why our Studio tier at $299 an episode covers unlimited revisions while Starter at $199 covers one. It is not that the second revision costs us $100. It is that unlimited revisions changes the shape of the whole relationship and we have to staff for it.
The four models you will actually be quoted
Strip away the branding and almost every podcast editing quote falls into one of four shapes.
- Hourly. Sold as fair, usually the worst of the four for the client. You pay for the editor's slowness, and you have no idea what the invoice will be until it lands. I have written at length about why we stopped quoting by the hour, and I have not once regretted it.
- Per finished minute. Common in corporate video, awkward for podcasts. A 62 minute episode and a 58 minute episode are the same work. The meter says otherwise.
- Per episode, flat. What we do. $199 or $299 depending on cameras and resolution, up to 60 minutes as the base, 30 minute shows cheaper and 90 minute shows more. You know the number before you send the files.
- Monthly retainer. A block of episodes at a discount for committed volume. Ours is a 25% saving monthly, or 15% on a 4-episode pack.
The model matters more than the rate. A cheap hourly editor with a slow workflow will cost you more than a flat rate studio and give you less certainty while doing it.
What the cheap end and the expensive end are really selling
At $40 to $80 an episode, something has to give, and it is nearly always the same thing: a person's eyes on the full runtime.
The workflow at that price is a silence detection pass, a filler word pass, an export, and a delivery. It is fast because a machine did the listening. And it produces episodes that sound technically fine and feel slightly wrong, in a way hosts struggle to name. Hosts arrive at us describing the symptom constantly, usually without knowing the cause.
The tell is always the same. Laughter gets clipped at the tail. A guest takes a breath before saying the honest thing and the breath is gone, so the honest thing lands flat. A pause that was doing real work gets treated as dead air.
Silence detection cannot tell the difference between a guest who has stopped talking and a guest who is about to say the best sentence of the episode.
That difference is worth money. Not infinite money. But more than $40.
At the other end of the table, at $800 and up, you are usually not buying a better cut. You are buying an account manager, a project manager, a producer layer, and a sales team with an office.
Some shows genuinely need that. If you are running a branded podcast inside a company with three stakeholders who each want sign off, the coordination is the product and the editing is a subtask. Pay for it happily.
Most independent hosts are not that. Most independent hosts are one or two people who want the episode back, want it to sound like them, and want to say "can we tighten minute 12" and have it happen. They are paying for a layer of process that exists to manage complexity they do not have.
I would rather charge less and put the money into the edit. So we do.
The turnaround premium is real, and it is smaller than you think
Every agency sells speed. Almost none of them price it honestly.
Our first cut lands in 48 hours and revisions come back the next working day. That is the standard offer, not a rush tier. Rush is $75 and it means 24 hours. If you want to see how the sausage is made, I broke down our scheduling in the piece on hitting 48 hours consistently, and the short version is that it is a capacity problem, not a heroics problem.
Here is the pricing lesson buried in that. An agency that charges a huge premium for a fast turnaround is telling you their normal turnaround is padded. Speed costs something, but it costs a scheduling constraint, not a fortune. If someone wants to double the rate for a two day delivery, ask what their standard delivery is and why.
Add-ons: where the honest agencies and the sneaky ones separate
This is the part of the quote I would read twice.
Some agencies quote a low base and then bill separately for things you assumed were included. Show notes. Chapters. Vertical clips. Thumbnails. Intro animation. Suddenly the $150 episode is $400 and you feel slightly conned, even though nothing dishonest happened.
We publish ours flat. Vertical clips are $25 each. Show notes and chapters together are $35. Rush is $75. That is the whole list. If you are comparing quotes, force every agency to give you their total for a real month, with every extra you actually want, and compare those numbers instead of the headline rate.
One more thing worth separating out. Editing and packaging are different crafts, and the agencies that bundle them at no extra cost are usually doing one of them badly. We keep thumbnails at our sister studio ClickTheory with its own pricing precisely because a thumbnail designer and a video editor are not the same person wearing two hats.
Cameras are the one input that legitimately changes the price
If there is a single technical variable that deserves to move the number, it is camera count.
A single camera edit is a rhythm problem. A three camera edit is a rhythm problem plus a decision problem: every few seconds someone chooses which face the audience should be looking at, and getting it wrong makes the conversation feel sluggish even when the words are perfect. If you want to understand why we split our tiers along that line rather than along runtime, our page on how we handle multi-cam episodes lays out the actual workflow difference.
That is the honest gap between $199 and $299. Not a marketing ladder. More angles, more decisions, higher resolution, and a revision policy that reflects the fact that more decisions means more chances you will want one changed.
Freelancer versus agency, priced properly
The freelancer will usually be cheaper per episode. That is real and I will not pretend otherwise.
What you are paying an agency for is continuity. A freelancer gets sick, gets a full time job, takes a holiday in the week your season launches. An agency has a bench. Whether that continuity is worth the delta depends entirely on how much your publishing schedule matters to you, which is exactly the tradeoff I walk through in the comparison of working with an agency versus a freelancer.
My honest take: if you publish monthly and enjoy the process, hire a freelancer you like and treat them well. If you publish weekly and a missed week costs you momentum, buy the bench.
How to read a quote without getting played
A short checklist I would use if I were on your side of the table.
- Ask whether a human watches the full episode. Ask it plainly. Listen to how fast the answer comes.
- Ask what the total is for one real month, including every add-on you actually want.
- Ask what happens on revision two. If revisions are limited, ask what a third one costs.
- Ask what the standard turnaround is, not the rush turnaround.
- Ask who the editor is and whether it is the same person every week. Consistency is a product feature.
- Ask what they do when a guest is difficult to edit, because that is when you find out if they have judgment or just a workflow.
That last one is the real test. Anyone can cut a great guest. The craft shows up when the guest is quiet, over-polite, or rambling, and there is a genuinely good conversation buried in there that has to be found rather than trimmed. We deal with that constantly, and it is why the approach to editing a quiet guest is one of the things I care most about getting right.
So here is what I would tell you if you were a friend. Do not buy the cheapest quote. Do not buy the most expensive one either.
Work out how many episodes a month you actually publish, multiply by the flat rate including the add-ons you need, and ask whether that number is defensible against what the show earns or is meant to build. If you are monetising, that maths is straightforward and I have laid out the revenue side in the breakdown of sponsorship rates. If you are not monetising yet, the question becomes how much a consistent, good sounding show is worth to your credibility, and only you can price that.
Then pick the agency whose pricing you could explain to someone else. If you cannot explain why they charge what they charge, you do not understand what you are buying, and neither do they.
We publish our numbers on the site for exactly that reason. If you want to talk through what your show would actually cost in a month, email me at samy@pixelsamy.com. I will tell you if a freelancer is a better fit for you, and I have done that more than once.