No single number exists. Build yours out of five lines

Self-shot means a phone, a window and your own time. The cash cost is near zero. The real cost is hours nobody logs.

This is how a large share of performing social ads are made, including plenty run by companies that could afford otherwise. It has one prerequisite. Somebody must be willing to appear on camera.

Commissioned individually means paying a creator, an editor, or both, per deliverable. The cost is a negotiated per-video price plus your internal briefing and reviewing time.

That internal time is routinely a quarter to a half of the invoice again. It never appears on the invoice.

Produced means a crew, a location, a director, talent, a music licence and a post house. The spend is mostly people-days. People-days are why the number frightens people.

No honest source gives one figure for all three. They are different products. Comparing their prices is like comparing the cost of a taxi to the cost of a car.

One further distinction decides which band you belong in. Self-shot and commissioned work buys attempts. Produced work buys a single asset you intend to run for a long time.

Teams get into trouble paying produced prices for testing. Then they wonder why the calendar only holds three creatives a quarter.

Ask which band each line of your plan belongs to before pricing any of it. The answer moves the total by a factor of a hundred.

Write the five lines down and fill them in with your own numbers. The total is your real cost per finished ad. Almost nobody has calculated it.

Fill them in for one recent ad rather than for a typical one. Typical is where the awkward lines quietly get rounded down to nothing.

Coordination and versioning are the two nobody bills you for. They are also the two that decide whether your testing calendar survives March.

Some of what you produce never goes live. Those still cost full price. Dividing by finished ads flatters you and connects to nothing downstream.

Divide total production spend by the number of creatives that got meaningful budget. That is cost per tested ad. It is the only figure that touches results.

Then take one more step. Published benchmarks put the winner share at 5 to 8 percent, per Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads.

At the middle of that range, fourteen tested creatives buy one expected winner. So your cost per winner is fourteen times your cost per tested ad.

Run that multiplication once with your current numbers. For most teams commissioning individually the answer is uncomfortable in a useful way.

It also explains a recurring mistake. The same teams keep concluding they have a creative problem when what they have is a supply problem.

At the low end your cost is time and your risk is inconsistency. Twelve videos shot across three months by whoever was free will vary in pace, framing and caption style. When they perform differently you learn nothing.

In the middle your cost is coordination and your risk is turnaround. One revision costs two days, so a creative needing two rounds is a week old before it goes live.

At the top your cost is calendar and your risk is commitment. A produced shoot bets a large sum on a few concepts before any has been tested. That is the most expensive mistake on this page.

Find the angle with volume, then spend real money making the winner beautiful. Nobody argues about a shoot for a concept that has already returned its cost twice.

Assembly is the only one of the five lines with a published rate. Cutroom takes one take of up to three minutes and returns a finished 9:16 MP4. A batch is 100 credits. An export is 20 credits per output minute.

That puts a thirty second ad at 110 credits. Basic is $39.99 a month for 2,500 credits. Premium is $79.99 for 5,000. A 1,000 credit top-up is $15 when a month runs long.

You direct that cut on the transcript rather than a timeline. So the second version of an ad costs an export instead of a second booking. That is where a fixed rate changes the arithmetic above.