Guides
How to price videography services: a measurement method
How to price videography services starts by tracking ten projects, separating shoot and post hours, then using your ratio to build a project cost floor.
What to take away
- How to price videography services starts with measuring your own post hours, not an opinion about how long editing takes.
- This page is a measurement protocol, not a rate card. It tells you what to record over the next ten projects and what to do with it.
- The number you are hunting is the ratio of finishing hours to shoot hours, broken out by project type.
- A fair margin is the one that survives the second revision round. Test every price against that, not against the invoice.
Why the measurement comes first
Ask ten owners what a corporate interview piece costs to finish and you get ten answers, all confident, most wrong about their own business. Editing time is invisible while it happens and forgotten once delivered. Nobody remembers the afternoon spent chasing a sync drift or rebuilding a lower third because the client changed their job title.
So the honest sequence is: measure, then model, then price. Skipping the first step is how a business ends up profitable on paper and empty in the bank.
The ten-project protocol
- Pick your last ten completed projects, or track the next ten. Ten is enough to see a pattern and small enough to actually finish.
- For each one, record shoot hours as they happenedcall time to wrap, plus travel, not the number you quoted.
- Record finishing hours in four bucketsingest and backup, first assembly, revisions, export and delivery. Four buckets, because the fix is different for each.
- Record the deliverable count separately. One master and five cutdowns is six things, and the sixth costs less than the first but is not free.
- Record the number of revision rounds actually used, and who asked for them.
- Record pass-through spend: music, stock, talent, permits, parking, media, couriers.
- Divide finishing hours by shoot hours for each project. Write down the average and the spread.
The spread matters more than the average. A project type with a tight spread can carry a fixed fee. A project type where the ratio swings wildly needs a different model, or a tighter written scope, or both.
Ten-Project Measurement Checklist
- Pick last ten completed projects
- Record shoot hourscall to wrap plus travel
- Record finishing hours in four buckets
- Record deliverable count separately
- Record revision rounds and who asked
- Record pass-through spend
- Divide finishing hours by shoot hours
Turning the measurements into a project-cost floor
Use letters, because your numbers are yours and a borrowed figure is worse than none.
Let S be measured shoot hours, R the measured post-to-shoot ratio for that project type, and P pre-production hours.
Total labor hours are P plus S plus R times S. Multiply by cost per working hour, add pass-through spend, and add the share of monthly fixed cost the project consumes. That gives the floor, and the price is the floor plus the margin you decided on before the client called.
If the resulting number embarrasses you, that is information. It usually means either your fixed costs are being carried by too few projects, or you are selling a project type whose ratio is out of control.
Where your hourly cost comes from
Two halves. Anchor the wage half outside your own guesswork: the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics tables publish employment and wage estimates by occupation, state and metropolitan area. That is a reasonable external reference for what an editor or camera operator costs where you hire.
The Pricing Arithmetic
- Smeasured shoot hours
- Rmeasured post-to-shoot ratio
- Ppre-production hours
- P + S + (R x S)total labor hours
The burden half is yours to calculate: payroll taxes, any required coverage, gear replacement, software, storage, vehicle, and the hours you pay for that nobody bills. Both halves come out of your books, so your books have to be able to produce them.
The IRS guidance on the records a small business should keep sets the baseline: a system that clearly shows income and expenses, with the documents behind purchases, payroll and assets retained. Project-level costing is a layer on top of that, and it will not exist unless you build it.
Adjusting for the things that change the ratio
Once you have the base ratio, four adjustments do most of the work.
- A second camera adds sync, logging and review time before it adds anything to the finished piece. Treat it as a post decision as well as a shoot decision.
- Interviews multiply. Each additional subject adds selection time that grows faster than the runtime does.
- Vertical versions are either composed on the day or rebuilt in the edit. The first is a shoot-day conversation, the second is billable finishing work.
- Captions and translation are their own line. Burned-in versus sidecar changes the export count as well as the labor.
Which of these apply depends on what you actually sell, and the mix that pays best is not the mix that is easiest to sell. That comparison sits with which video work actually pays.
What you may claim about your prices
If you publish a starting-from figure, it is an advertising claim. The FTC's advertising guidance for small businesses sets the standard that claims be truthful, not misleading, and supportable, with material connections behind any endorsement disclosed. In practice: the entry price has to be available on real work, and its conditions belong beside it.
Common questions
How long does the measurement take?
If you are tracking forward, it takes as long as ten projects take. If you have decent project files and calendar records, a backward look at ten finished jobs is an afternoon. Do the backward look first, then keep tracking.
My ratio came out much higher than I expected. Now what?
Two paths, and they are not exclusive. Reduce the ratio by tightening the deliverable spec, standardizing your capture so the camera, audio and lighting setup stops creating post problems, and closing revision rounds properly. Or accept the ratio and raise the price. What you must not do is keep the price and hope.
Should I price by day or by project?
By day when someone else owns the outcome and your risk ends at wrap. By project when you own the deliverables, because that is where post risk lives. The full comparison of quoting models is in how video projects are priced.
Does this change when I hire?
It changes cost per hour, not method, and what you must prove about hours worked. It adds new source of variance: a new editor's ratio is not yours, so rerun the protocol on their projects before you price around them.
The gear they are handed matters too, which is where the kit checklist for a first shoot earns its place.
Is a fair margin a percentage?
A percentage reports a margin; it does not set one. Set it from what the business must fund: replacement gear, quiet months, your own time off, and the growth you want.
Then check whether the market you sell into supports it, which depends heavily on where you work and who else is there, covered in expanding into another market.
