You are paid per deliverable. The re-cuts are unpaid.

Rate cards are written per video. Briefs are written per test.

Those two documents stopped matching about two years ago, and the difference comes out of your evening.

The ask is reasonable from the brand's side.

They need multiple openings against the same body to find out which one holds.

Roughly 5 to 8 percent of creatives carry spend, per Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads.

It is only unreasonable in what it costs you. The filming was one session.

The cutting is four sessions, each with its own captions, its own timing and its own export.

So creators quietly cap variants at two, deliver them late, or price the third so high the brand stops asking.

All three cost you the repeat booking.

The brands who buy the most are the ones running structured tests, so the clients with the best budgets have the worst effect on your hourly rate.

Move the product mention earlier. Cut the bit about the packaging. Can we try it without music.

Each of those is one sentence to type and one timeline to reopen.

In a timeline editor the change is never local.

Pull one line and every caption, every cut point and every clip after it shifts.

You are not editing a sentence. You are rebuilding the back half.

That asymmetry is the actual economics of UGC work.

The client's cost of asking is near zero. Your cost of answering is an hour, so the asks keep coming.

Nothing about that changes until the edit stops being a timeline.

Look at where the hours go on a revision. Almost none of it is judgement.

It is re-syncing captions, nudging clips back into place and exporting a second time.

Upload the take, up to three minutes.

Cutroom transcribes the read, drafts the cut, places b-roll against your words and returns a finished 9:16 MP4 with captions burned in.

Then you work on the words. Delete the packaging line and the cut rebuilds around what is left.

Highlight the product mention and a clip lands over exactly those words.

Change the pace and the whole thing re-cuts.

There is no timeline to reopen. That is the point.

The brand's one sentence becomes your one action, and the asymmetry that was eating your margin closes.

Caption look is controllable across six packs, plus colour, weight, size and position.

A brand that wants its own text treatment gets it without a design round.

Your own product footage lives in your workspace library and drops into any slot with one highlight.

A finished thirty second cut is about 110 credits. Four variants from one shoot is roughly 440.

That sits inside a single month of Basic at $39.99 for 2,500 credits.

Premium is $79.99 for 5,000 credits, about 45 finished cuts a month.

That carries several brands through a test cycle without rationing.

The commercial move is to stop pricing per video and start pricing per test set.

Four openings against one body, delivered together, is a more useful product than one hero video.

It costs you one shoot.

The trial is 7 days and 300 credits with no card, which is two finished cuts.

Enough to run one real brief through it before you change a rate card.

The deliverable is a finished 9:16 MP4 with captions burned in. It goes straight into an ads manager.

There is no project file, because there is no project to assemble.

Say that in the quote rather than at handover. Brands that archive editable timelines will want those cut elsewhere.

Exports are vertical only. A client who also wants a 1:1 or a 16:9 master needs those made in a second tool.

Source takes cap at three minutes, so a five minute unboxing gets filmed as a shorter read.

In practice that ceiling keeps a deliverable to one idea, which is what a test set needs.

Product shots you filmed yourself go in your workspace library and land under the words that describe them.

Music is a toggle, a track and a level. There is no grade and no mix, so pick the quiet room.

The take is the ceiling, and the room is the cheapest upgrade you own.