Use case
5 Reasons Ecommerce Brands Let Cutroom Cut Their Short-Form VSLs
Your offer does not change. The angle does, and every angle is another video. That is the whole problem.
- per finished ad, on Basic
- About $2
- the longest take it accepts
- 3 min
- roughly how long the edit takes
- 1 min
The bottleneck was never the media buying. It is the next creative.
You already know the arithmetic. Most creatives lose. The one that wins gets fatigued in a few weeks and you need the next one ready before it does. So the whole thing runs on how many angles you can put in front of people, and how fast.
Then you price it up. A freelance editor is $300 to $400 a video, which is what creators report paying in public discussions. A UGC creator is a brief, a shipment and a wait. Either way you end up testing four angles instead of forty, and not because four was the right number.
Cutroom takes one take to camera and gives back a finished vertical ad in about a minute, for about $2. Not a rough cut: the b-roll sits on the words you said, the captions are timed to your voice, the cuts are made, and it is ready to upload.
Here are the five reasons ecommerce teams use it.
One offer, one sitting, five angles
You only know which one wins after you have run all of them, which is exactly why they have to be cheap.
One limit, before you spend anything
Cutroom takes a single take of up to three minutes and gives back one upright video. Short-form VSLs, hook tests and UGC-style creative are exactly what it is for.
If your VSL is a twenty-minute webinar or a multi-camera studio shoot, this is the wrong tool, and we would rather say that here than after you have paid.
The word VSL means both things in this market, and only one of them fits in three minutes of input. That sentence is at the top of this page on purpose rather than in a footnote at the bottom.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Ten angles for the price of one edit
At $300 a video every angle is a bet you place before you know anything. At about $2 a finished ad you stop rationing the test, and the test is the only part that actually tells you something.
Record the same offer five ways in one sitting: problem-first, price-first, before-and-after, objection, founder story. Upload all five and run them the same afternoon.
One edit is 100 credits and exporting is 20 credits a minute, so a thirty-second ad is 110 credits from upload to file. Basic gives you 2,500 a month, which is about twenty finished ads.
When one fatigues you shoot the next angle instead of scheduling a call about it.
What each 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.
The b-roll lands on the words you said
Most tools drop a clip in on a timer, one every six or eight seconds, fitting or not. Cutroom reads what you said and puts each shot on the words it belongs to. Drag it onto other words and it goes there.
You say "our warehouse in New York" and a warehouse shot covers those five words. Not the sentence before it, not the one after.
For an ad that matters more than it does for a Reel: the proof has to land on the claim, or it is decoration.
The proof lands on the claim
Five words get one shot. Drag it and it follows the words, not a point in time.
Your own product footage gets used before stock
Upload what you have already filmed and Cutroom labels what is in each clip. After that it reaches for yours first, and only falls back to the free library for what you never shot.
And when you are talking about the product itself, Cutroom will not drop generic stock over it. It uses your own footage there or it leaves you on screen, which is the right call, because a stranger's hand holding a different jar is worse than no shot at all.
That one rule is the difference between an ad that looks like yours and an ad that looks like every other ad in the category.
A stranger's jar, or yours
A stock search gives you somebody else's product. Your library gives you the one you actually sell.
Fix one thing without starting over, and see the bill first
Change the one bit that bothers you and the rest stays where it was. Fix a word it misheard, swap a shot, move the captions off your face, pick a different caption style. All of it is free and all of it is undoable.
Exporting costs 20 credits per minute of finished video, and that number sits next to the Export button before you press it, not after.
If an export fails on our side, the credits come back on their own. You do not have to spot it and you do not have to ask.
Before you click Export
The number sits next to the button. It is the number you get charged.
Captions, cuts and music come with it
Six caption styles, part of the picture itself rather than a subtitle file, timed to your voice word for word. Transitions between shots: a whip pan, a punch-in, a glitch, a light sweep.
The ums come out, the long silences get shorter, and nothing is ever cut halfway through a word. Music is one tap away and starts switched off, so the first thing you hear back is your own voice.
None of that was a setting you had to find, which matters when you are cutting the fifth angle of the day.
- Clean: one line in a pill. Out of the way.
- Bold: huge condensed caps with a hard shadow.
- Karaoke: a marker box on the word you are saying.
- Meme: white outlined text, top and bottom.
Bold, for a hook that has to land in two seconds
Huge condensed caps with a hard shadow. One of six packs, and you pick where it sits on the frame.
Questions people ask
- If I make an ad, can I actually download it, or is there a paywall at the end?
- You download it. 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. The free plan gives you three videos, and those three carry the Cutroom mark across the middle. On Basic and Premium there is nothing of ours on the file. 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.
- My VSL is twenty minutes long. Can I use this?
- No. Cutroom takes a single take of up to three minutes, and the ceiling is enforced at upload rather than discovered at the end. A short-form VSL, a hook test or a UGC-style ad is exactly the job. A long-form webinar VSL is not, and no plan changes that. We would rather you read this before adding a card than after.
- Where does the $2 a video come from?
- Basic is $39.99 a month for 2,500 credits. Cutting one upload is 100 credits and exporting is 20 credits for every finished minute, so a thirty-second ad is 110 credits from upload to file. That is roughly twenty finished ads a month, and $39.99 divided by twenty is about $2. The editor rates we compare it to are what creators report paying in public discussions, not a survey.
- 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.
- My last tool charged me for exports that failed. What happens here?
- Nothing. A failed export hands the credits straight back, automatically, without a ticket. If the job stalls instead of failing, a sweeper finds it and does the same.
- 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.
- 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. 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.
- The last tool put the one thing I needed in the tier above. What is gated here?
- The editor is the whole product and it is on every plan, including the free one. What the plans change is credits and the tools sitting in the same room as the editor. The free plan gives you three videos, editor only, carrying the Cutroom mark across the middle. Lite at $19.99 takes the mark off; Basic at $39.99 adds avatars and generated music, with 2,500 credits a month. Premium at $79.99 adds the animation tool and product shots, with 5,000. Both paid plans export at the same size and render in the same queue at the same speed.
Test it on an angle you already shot. One take in, one finished ad out, and the price of the export is on the button before you press it.