Commissioned against in-house: compare the revision policy first

How many days from brief to delivery, and does that clock include your own approval time.

How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as a round. A new take is not the same as a caption change.

What an additional edit of an already delivered asset costs. Most of your changes arrive after you have seen the numbers.

Get those three in writing before comparing any price. A low price with one revision round is frequently more expensive than a higher one with three.

Ask about a rush turnaround too. Half the value of fast creative is being able to react to something.

Nothing in those three questions is about who the person is or where they are, and nothing should be.

Turnaround, revision policy and cost per edit are the whole comparison. Everything else is a preference dressed up as a criterion.

Ask the same three about your own in-house route, honestly, and you will have two comparable columns for the first time.

Commissioned footage buys you what in-house production cannot. A different face, a different home, a genuine stranger endorsing you.

In-house production buys a different set. Same-day turnaround, revisions at the cost of an export, and no scheduling.

Neither list makes the other wrong. Most accounts that run well end up buying both.

The mistake is comparing them on cost per asset, because they are not producing the same asset.

Compare them on cost per attempt, and on how quickly you can act on what an attempt told you.

That reframing usually changes the answer, and it changes it in a direction a spreadsheet of unit prices never shows.

One asset is a face you cannot get. The other is a week of attempts at a fixed price. Those are different purchases.

One talking-head take of up to three minutes batches for 100 credits. Export costs 20 credits per output minute.

So a forty second finished ad is about 113 credits. A re-export after a change is about 13.

Basic at $39.99 gives 2,500 credits a month, which is roughly twenty-one finished ads.

One three minute session can hold four scripts, each batched separately. That is where the real efficiency comes from.

The cost that never appears on an invoice is somebody's willingness to stand in front of a phone.

If nobody in the building will do it, the in-house column collapses and commissioned footage is the honest answer.

If one person will, the column holds at every volume on the chart below, and it holds at the same price per attempt.

The split that works for most small brands is to commission footage and produce the ads from it in-house.

One creator session gives you hands, product and a face you do not have. That footage is reusable across every ad you make afterwards.

Then upload your own take. Highlight the phrase where the product is named and the commissioned clip lands over exactly those words.

Swap the clip in any spot if the first choice is wrong. No new brief, no waiting.

That keeps the part you cannot make and removes the part that was slowing you down, which is the revision loop.

It also means one commission serves twenty attempts rather than one.

Brief the creator for footage rather than for a finished ad. Hands, product, room, face. No script, no edit, no revision rounds.

That brief is cheaper to write, faster to deliver and infinitely more reusable than a finished asset was.

Nobody will film. That single fact removes the cheap route and no software fixes it.

Your product must be handled on camera and nobody in the building can shoot it well.

You need a variety of faces and homes, which one person in one room cannot produce.

You need a horizontal file, since every export here is 9:16.

You need a fixed brand frame on every asset, and nothing of yours is stamped on the export.

There is a fair test for which column you belong in. Look at your last ten ads and count how many needed a face or a pair of hands you do not have.

If the answer is most of them, commission the footage and produce everything around it here.

If the answer is one or two, commission that footage once and make the rest yourself. You are paying a revision loop for almost nothing.

Either way the comparison stops being about price and becomes about which asset you genuinely cannot shoot, which is the only version worth having.