How Much Does a SaaS Explainer Video Cost?

"How much does an explainer video cost?" has a genuinely enormous answer range, and most pages attempting it either dodge with "it depends" or quote one number that was true for one studio on one project. Both are useless when you are putting a line in a budget.

So here is the honest version: what actually moves the price, what the market broadly looks like, and exactly what we charge — our prices are published, so you can check them on the packages page rather than taking this post's word for it.

The six things that actually move the price

Almost every quote you will receive is a function of the same handful of variables. Understanding them is what lets you cut a quote in half without cutting the video in half.

Length

Length is the crudest lever and the most misunderstood one. A 90-second video is not 50% more work than a 60-second one — it is usually closer to double, because the extra thirty seconds are almost always the hardest thirty seconds: the middle section where you have to explain something concrete rather than restate a value proposition. Every additional scene needs its own layout, its own transitions in and out, and its own line of voiceover to land against.

This is why our fixed-price tiers are written in duration bands rather than per-second rates. Sub-60 seconds is a different animal from sub-120 seconds.

Animation style

Style is the biggest single multiplier in the entire industry, and it is also the one clients think about least. Roughly, from cheapest to most expensive:

• Motion graphics over screen capture — your real UI, animated into, zoomed, highlighted, annotated. Fast to produce, ages with your product.
• Abstracted UI motion — your interface rebuilt as clean vector shapes and simplified panels. More design work up front, but it survives a redesign and never shows a stale button.
• Custom character or illustrated animation — bespoke characters, rigged and animated. Every asset is drawn from scratch. This is where quotes climb fastest.
• 3D product rendering — modelled, textured, lit, and rendered. Also the slowest to revise, because a note on lighting means re-rendering.

A team that asks for "an explainer video" and receives a five-figure quote has usually, without realising it, described the third or fourth option.

Rebuilt UI versus captured UI

Related but distinct. If you can give a production team a demo login and a stable interface, they can capture the real thing and the cost is mostly editorial. If your UI has to be rebuilt frame by frame — because it is not built yet, because it is under NDA, or because the real thing is too dense to read at video size — that is a design project sitting inside a video project, and it is priced accordingly.

Voiceover

A professional, directed voiceover read is a separate line item almost everywhere, ours included. The cost tracks script word count and licence territory, because a voice artist is licensing their performance to you for a defined use. Plenty of strong explainers ship with no voiceover at all — captions, sound design, and typography carry the message, which is also the version that works in a muted social feed.

Additional languages

A second language is not a second video, but it is not free either. A subtitle-only version is cheap: translate the script, produce a new caption file, check nothing overflows its safe area. A re-voiced version costs substantially more, because on-screen text has to be re-laid out for the new copy length and the mix has to be rebuilt against the music-and-effects stem. That stem is why we deliver one on every project — it is what makes a later language version an edit rather than a rebuild.

Revision rounds and rush

Revisions are priced into every quote whether or not the studio says so. What matters is how a round is defined. For us, one round means one consolidated set of feedback — twenty notes sent together are one round, not twenty. The same twenty notes trickled in over three days genuinely are several rounds of rework.

Rush is the last variable. Moving a project to the front of a production queue displaces other work, so it is quoted as an uplift on the project fee, agreed in writing before the clock starts.

What the market broadly looks like

Be sceptical of anyone quoting you a precise industry average — the sample is unknowable and the definitions are inconsistent. What we can tell you is the shape of what we commonly see when clients come to us with competing quotes in hand.

Freelance marketplaces sit at the bottom, often at two or three figures, with quality ranging from excellent to template-stamped depending entirely on who you find. Small studios and boutique agencies commonly quote in the low four figures for a single custom explainer. Established agencies producing character animation or 3D routinely quote well into five figures — for a brand film with an original score and a cast read, that is a different product rather than an inflated one.

The band that catches people out is the middle. Two quotes that both say "90-second animated explainer" can differ by an order of magnitude, and the difference is almost never craft — it is the six variables above, plus whether source files and ownership are included or sold back to you later.

What we charge

Our prices are published rather than quoted on request. In full:

• $100 — the Reel Only pack: ten promotional reels, under 20 seconds each, for teams that already have core assets and just need social volume.
• $200 — Solo Starter: one Product/SaaS explainer under 60 seconds, with one revision round.
• $300 — Solo Launch: a product intro under 60 seconds, a walkthrough under 120 seconds, a tutorial under 120 seconds, and five reels.
• $950 — Growth Bundle: the launch kit, including a countdown/hype launch video, a 2D/3D product intro, an animated logo reveal, and modular ad variations, with unlimited revision rounds.
• From $2,900 — Full-Funnel Bundle: everything above plus Lottie and web motion, run as a rolling 30-day engagement.
• $2,450/mo — the monthly retainer: unlimited requests, one at a time from a queue you control.
• $40/hr — contractual hours, minimum 20 hours a month, for long-running partnerships scheduled against your roadmap.

Fixed-price packages run 3 to 14 days for the whole kit — the exact figure is printed on each one, and it covers every asset in the package, not one file. A custom one-off project outside the package ladder runs 7 to 10 days. On the retainer, a single request averages about 48 hours, because a request is one asset rather than a project. The turnaround breakdown sets those three clocks side by side.

Included versus add-on

The part of a quote that costs people money later is rarely the headline number. Included in every package, at no extra charge:

• Full source files — the After Effects or Premiere project, linked assets, and fonts. Ownership transfers on final payment, with no usage window and no separate buy-out.
• Burned-in captions plus separate .srt and .vtt sidecar files.
• Properly reframed aspect ratios for the ratios in your brief, repositioned rather than centre-cropped from one master.
• Poster frames and social card stills.
• A licensed-asset list naming every music, stock, and font licence used.

Quoted separately as add-ons: professional voiceover, additional language versions, extra reels beyond your package, extra aspect ratios, extra revision rounds on the fixed-round tiers, and rush delivery.

How payment works

Packages split across two milestones: a deposit that books your production slot and starts the work, and the balance on final delivery. Both amounts and both dates appear on the invoice before anything begins. Cancel before production starts and the deposit is refunded in full; cancel after it starts and the unstarted portion of the scope is refunded. The retainer bills monthly in advance, with no minimum term.

Spending less without buying worse

If the number in front of you is too high, the productive moves are almost always these: shorten the video, capture the real UI instead of rebuilding it, ship without a voiceover, take subtitles instead of a re-voice for secondary languages, and consolidate your feedback into one pass. Every one of those cuts cost without cutting craft.

The unproductive move is buying a cheaper video with the same scope, because the scope is what the money pays for.

If you want a number for your specific case, the SaaS and app explainer service page sets out how a typical engagement is structured, and the pricing page explains when a package beats a retainer. If your video is tied to a launch date rather than a landing page, our product launch video guide covers what that changes about scope and schedule.