An animated explainer video costs $5,000–$15,000 from a traditional agency (4–6 weeks), $20–90/month from a DIY tool (your time not included), or $1,500–$3,500 from us — with twenty candidate directions delivered free in 24 hours before you commit a dollar. This page lists real numbers, including our own, because "contact us for pricing" is not an answer.
The cost landscape
| Option | Typical price | Turnaround | What you actually get | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Traditional agency | $5,000–$15,000 | 4–6 weeks | Discovery calls, a script round, storyboard round, 1–2 animation rounds. Quality varies with the team on your account. | | Freelancer | $1,000–$8,000 | 2–6 weeks | Enormous variance. You do the creative direction and project management yourself. | | DIY tools (Synthesia, HeyGen, etc.) | $20–90/mo | hours | Avatar or template video. Fast, but templated — the output looks like the tool, not like your product. | | 20cuts | $1,500–$3,500 | board in 24h, first cut in 5 business days | 20 free candidate directions rendered from your real product; you pick one; we produce the finished video. |
Agencies aren't overcharging, mostly — their process is expensive: discovery meetings, account management, hand-keyframed animation, and revision cycles that each cross several calendars. You're paying for coordination as much as craft.
Our actual prices
These are the live prices on our pricing page, not a teaser range:
- Launch — $1,500. 60–90 seconds, house style, house voice, 1 revision round. 4K + 1080p, captions, thumbnail. First cut in 5 business days.
- Pro — $2,750. Up to 2.5 minutes, brand-matched (your design tokens ported), choice of voice + music bed, 2 revision rounds, plus 3 vertical/square cutdowns and YouTube metadata.
- Flagship — $3,500. Up to 3 minutes, voice clone or your recorded VO, 3 revision rounds, 12 months of source retention, and a 72-hour first cut.
Payment is 100% upfront via Stripe. There is no call to schedule and no quote to request — the number above is the number.
Why we can price at a fraction of agency rates
We built our whole process around the candidate stage: paste your product's URL and roughly twenty short animated directions — different hooks, styles, and angles, every frame built from your real UI — come back within 24 hours, free and watermarked. That replaces the agency's discovery call, script round, and storyboard round in one artifact. You spec the video by picking, not by meeting. Human craft is concentrated where it matters: the finished video you actually paid for.
The honest caveat: if you need 3D character animation, filmed footage, or a brand mascot with a personality arc, we're the wrong shop — that work is genuinely expensive and an agency is the right call.
What drives cost, everywhere
- Length. Cost scales with runtime — but so does viewer drop-off. Most products are better served by 60–90 tight seconds than 3 loose minutes.
- Revision structure. Unlimited-revision offers price the chaos in. Fixed rounds with a stated change-order policy (ours: wording, pacing, color, and asset swaps included; new scenes or a new thesis quoted) keep the price honest.
- Custom vs. templated visuals. Template libraries are cheap and look it. Fully custom is beautiful and slow. Rendering from your real product UI is the middle path: specific to you, without hand-drawing every frame.
- Voice. A good house voiceover is a solved line item — the question is taste, not technology. Custom recorded VO adds cost and a booking dependency.
The way to answer this for your product
Numbers on a page only narrow the range. The real answer costs nothing here: submit your product's URL and judge twenty actual directions for your product in 24 hours. If none of them are right, you've spent zero dollars and about ninety seconds.