Comparison
Hire a video editor, or use AI? Here is the arithmetic
A freelance editor runs $300 to $400 a video. Cutroom works out at about $2. Below is where both those numbers come from, the five jobs you were paying for, and the part where a human is still better.
- what creators report paying for one edited video
- $300 to $400
- $39.99 a month divided by roughly 20 videos
- about $2
- each exported minute, after the 100 credits that cut it
- 20 CR
The numbers, side by side
A freelance editor runs $300 to $400 for one video. That is what creators report paying in public discussions, not a survey.
Cutroom is $39.99 a month for 2,500 credits. One batch is 100 credits and exporting is 20 credits a minute of finished video, so a one-minute ad is about 120 credits and a month is roughly twenty of them. That is about $2 a video.
One video, two bills
The left column is what creators report paying. The right one is our own price list, and the sum behind it is on this page.
| A freelance editor | Cutroom | |
|---|---|---|
| One video | $300 to $400, what creators report paying | About $2, being $39.99 divided by roughly 20 videos |
| Twenty videos a month | $6,000 and up, before revisions | $39.99, or $29.99 billed yearly |
| Ready in | Days, sometimes a week | A minute or two |
| You want one thing changed | Another round, another wait, sometimes another fee | You change it yourself, free, and the rest stays put |
| Time difference | Usually. Every note costs you a day | None. It is awake when you are |
| Does every video look the same? | Depends who was free that week | Yes, the same look every time |
| If it goes wrong | You have paid, and you are negotiating | A failed export hands the credits back on its own. First charge back in full for 7 days |
Where the $2 comes from
The small bar is not a trick of the scale. It really is that far apart.
Basic is $39.99 a month for 2,500 credits. One batch, meaning the transcript, the cut and the b-roll search, is 100 credits. Exporting is 20 credits per minute of finished video. A one-minute ad is about 120 credits, so roughly twenty of them a month.
The free tier is three videos with our logo across the middle, and the editor. Avatars and music open on Basic. Animation and product shots open on Premium at $79.99 a month, or $59.99 billed yearly. The exported file is the same on both paid plans.
Editor rates are what creators report paying in public discussions, not a survey.
One finished video: $300 against $2
The small bar has a minimum height so it stays visible. The numbers sit beside it so nobody has to trust the scale.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
The number that most people miss
It is not really $300. It is $300 per attempt. Post five videos and find out two of them worked, and you have spent $1,500 to learn something you could have learned for ten.
A creator, in a public discussion about editor pricing: "If you charge a creator $300 for a video, that video needs to break 100,000 views for the creator to BREAK EVEN. Less than 1% of YouTube videos will ever meet this threshold."
A creator, in a YouTube comment with 61 likes: "I hired an editor, and let's just say I wasted my money."
That is the real reason people search for this. Not that editors are expensive. That hiring one is a bet, and you place it before you know anything.
What $300 an attempt is buying
Published benchmarks put the share of ad creatives that become winners at roughly 5 to 8 percent, per Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads. At $300 a go, thirteen attempts is $3,900.
Five jobs you were paying someone to do
This is what an editor actually does to a talking video before it is worth posting. All five now happen while you make coffee.
- Cutting in the b-roll. A shot lands on the words that need it. Say "our warehouse in New York" and a warehouse covers those five words, not the sentence before, not the one after.
- Finding the footage. You never open a clip site. It searches for you, and it uses your own clips first if you have uploaded any.
- Captions, timed to your voice. Six styles, part of the picture itself, following you word for word. You pick where they sit.
- The cuts and the tidying. The ums come out, long pauses get tightened, cuts land between words. Transitions between shots: a whip pan, a punch-in, a glitch, a light sweep.
- Music, when you want it. It starts off on purpose, so you hear your own voice first. One tap turns it on and it follows your pace, on Basic and up. You did not pick a genre.
Five words, one shot, landing exactly there
The bit an editor charges most for.
The part nobody puts in the pitch
An editor has a bad week. An editor goes quiet for four days and then sends a version you did not ask for. An editor is asleep when you finally have time to look at it.
None of that is a character flaw. It is what working with a person is. But it is the actual cost, and it never appears in the quote.
A creator, in a public thread about hiring editors: "I need a video editor under $200 as I'm a disabled content creator... I'm worried of being scammed and/or don't want to risk losing my time and money. I am on a fixed income."
You do not negotiate with Cutroom, and it does not have an opinion about your fifth revision.
What a time difference costs
Not money. Days, one per note, because they are asleep when you look.
When you should still hire someone
We would rather you knew this here than after paying us.
An editor brings judgement. They will tell you the first forty seconds are boring and they will be right. They can work with footage from four cameras, a landscape edit, a twenty-minute video, a story that needs restructuring. They understand your brand after the third job in a way no tool does.
Cutroom takes one talking video under three minutes and gives you back a vertical 1080p MP4. That is the whole job. If what you need is bigger than that, a person is the right answer and we would rather say so.
But if you are posting twenty of these a month and $300 a go does not add up, that is exactly what this is for.
Questions people ask
- If I make an ad, can I actually download it, or is there a paywall at the end?
- You download it. On a paid plan nothing of ours sits on the picture. The free tier is three videos with our logo across the middle, and that logo is the only difference between what you make free and what you buy: the same editor, the same length, the same cut. Exporting costs credits, and the price sits on the Export button before you press it, so nothing about the bill turns up at the end. There is no card at the front door, and you get seven days to walk through it: the free tier is three finished videos, with 600 credits, which covers those three edits and re-exporting them after you change a caption.
- Will it work with my kind of video?
- Cutroom takes one upright video of a person talking, up to three minutes, with sound on it. You get back one upright video at 1080 by 1920. Landscape footage is refused at upload, before a single credit is charged. A wide take inside an upright frame is a strip between black bars, and we would rather stop you than sell you that. A video with no sound is refused for the same reason. There is no widescreen export and no 4K; a 4K upload comes back at 1080p, the same as everyone else's. If you shoot horizontal, or your videos run twenty minutes, this is not your tool yet, and we would rather you knew that here than after paying.
- If something breaks, do I get a real person or a chatbot?
- A person. There is no support bot, and nothing in the product answers you automatically. Support is a live chat inside the app: if somebody is at the desk your reply lands while you are still sitting there, and if nobody is, it comes back by email and stays in the same thread so it cannot get lost. You can also reply to any email we send.
- Does this work in my language, or only English?
- Eight languages today, by name: English (US), English (UK), Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), German, French, Dutch and Italian. You pick yours from a list when you upload. If your language is not one of those eight, Cutroom will not do a good job for you yet. We would rather write that down than sell you a subscription and let you find out.
- If I want out, can I do it myself, and does the charging actually stop?
- Yourself, without emailing or calling anyone. In Settings, then Billing, you press Cancel subscription, a screen tells you exactly what that does, and you finish in Stripe's own billing portal, so the cancellation sits on the biller's books rather than on our word. Your plan then runs to the end of the period you already paid for and stops. Nothing is charged after that. There is no fee and we do not ask why.
- How many videos do I actually get for this?
- Two charges make an ad, and you see both before you spend them. Cutting one upload is 100 credits: writing out what you said, the edit itself, and the b-roll search. Exporting is 20 credits for every finished minute, charged for the length you actually export, so a thirty-second ad is 10. That makes a thirty-second ad 110 credits from upload to finished file. Basic gives 2,500 credits a month, which is about twenty finished ads. Everything between those two charges is free: editing, previewing, undoing, searching for clips, uploading your own footage, changing your mind. Exporting the same cut again unchanged is free too. Credits you do not use stay in the account.
- Can I post what comes out, or will I still be in there for an hour?
- Two things make the difference, and both are structural rather than a promise about quality. First, Cutroom does not pick which parts of your video to keep. Your whole take stays in, in order. It tightens the dead air and drops the ums, and it only ever cuts where a sentence ends, never mid-word. Second, when it gets something wrong you fix it by pointing, not by editing. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Delete a line and the cut rebuilds around it. Correct a word it misheard and every caption of that word changes. All of it is free, all of it is undoable, and there is no timeline to learn.
- If I cancel, do I keep what I already made?
- Yes. Cancelling moves you to the free plan. Your projects stay, your exported videos stay, and credits already in your balance stay spendable. Nothing is deleted because you stopped paying. Files only go when you delete a project yourself, or when you ask us to close the account, and then everything goes within 30 days.
- If it turns out not to be what I thought, do I get my money back?
- Your first charge: yes, in full, if you tell us within seven days that you did not mean to be billed. No argument. Later charges: we refund unused subscription time when something went wrong on our side, and we say so plainly when we think it did not. Credits already spent on finished videos are not refundable, because that video was made and the machines were paid at the moment it ran. There is one case where we say no, and it is written on the refunds page rather than discovered by you. And if an export fails on our side, you do not need to ask at all: the credits come back on their own.
- Does this work on my phone, or do I need a computer?
- It works on a phone. Cutroom is a website, not an app, so there is no iPhone version and no Android version, and no feature that lives on one device and not the other. A big screen is more comfortable for marking up your words, and the app says so once, but nothing is locked away.
That is less than one hour of a freelancer's time. Upload the video you were about to send someone, and see what comes back.