Comparison
Resolve costs no money. It costs the months before you are quick.
Resolve gives away editing, colour and audio at a professional standard. That offer is real and unusual. What it charges instead is the months before you are quick. Here is where those hours go, what an ad costs here, and how Cutroom exports one.
- actions in the Cutroom editor
- 11
- the longest source it accepts
- 3 min
- per finished minute exported
- 20 CR
The free tier is real, and colour grading at that level is not sold anywhere else this way
A full editor, a colour suite used on feature films, audio tooling and compositing, all without paying.
That is an unusual offer. Anybody who wants to learn post-production should take it.
It handles any format, any length, multi-camera and delivery specifications no narrow tool will touch.
It runs locally on hardware you already own, so there is no upload wait and no meter on anything.
Here is what the free part costs. Nodes, pages, delivery settings and colour management all sit between you and the first ad.
Some people enjoy paying that. A founder with a phone and an ad due Thursday does not.
Cutroom has nothing underneath to configure. One take in, a finished 9:16 MP4 out, captions burned in and coverage on the words you marked.
Four minutes of attention, and the first one ships the day you open it.
Competence is the price, and competence is paid before the first ad ships
Be honest about how often you will open it. A tool used twice a month never becomes familiar.
Every session starts cold. That is the real reason powerful free software so often produces nothing.
There is a harder problem underneath, and it hits fluent users too. Skill does not reduce the number of steps in a repeated job.
The thirtieth vertical ad has the same chain as the fifth. Import, cut, caption, source footage, mix, deliver.
That chain is the ceiling on how many creatives get tested. No amount of free software moves it.
Here the chain is three steps and one of them is pressing export.
Pace is a setting. Coverage is a ceiling. The cut arrives drafted before you look at it.
That is what a credit buys, and it is the only thing free software cannot give you back.
Where the time goes before the first ad ever exports
Free software with a learning curve is paid for in hours before it produces anything.
- Learning the tool to a usable levelAbout 20 hrs
- First finished vertical adAbout 2 hrs
- Cutroom, first finished adUnder 1 hr
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Nothing to configure, because there is nothing underneath to configure
Upload one take of up to three minutes. It returns transcribed, drafted and captioned as a 9:16 MP4.
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Swap it, or search millions of free ones.
Delete a line and the cut rebuilds around the gap. Change the pace and the whole piece re-cuts.
Emphasise the word your claim turns on so it pops in the captions. Fix a mis-heard word and the text follows.
Six caption packs, five clip entrances, a headline you write or take, music under the read at a level you set.
No pages, no nodes, no delivery presets, no render queue. Eleven marks and a file.
Coverage is capped by pace: 40 percent on chill, 45 on normal, 52 on fast. The person you filmed carries the ad.
Trim the opening or the ending. Write the headline that has to survive the first three seconds.
- Batch 100 credits covers transcript, director pass and b-roll search
- Coverage capped at 40, 45 or 52 percent by pace
- Runs in a browser, nothing to install and no hardware requirement
- Somebody has to film, or own a photo the avatar module can drive
What a credit buys, and what it does not: the specification
A batch of 100 credits buys the transcript, the director pass and the b-roll search. Export is 20 credits a finished minute.
In goes one talking-head take of up to three minutes. Out comes a 9:16 MP4 with captions burned in.
There is no grading, no node graph, no compositing and no audio work of any kind.
There is no timeline and no frame-level control at any price. Pace and deletion are the repair kit.
There is no local processing, so every take uploads first. There is no version history either.
Nothing of yours is stamped on the export, so a fixed brand sign-off is added elsewhere.
Those are facts to plan around. The one number they do not touch is your creative count, which is next.
The cost of the next attempt is the lever, and free software never lowers it
Winners run at 5 to 8 percent of creatives, per Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads. One in thirteen to one in twenty.
Six a month draws under one winner, graded properly or not.
So the lever is what the next attempt costs. In a professional suite that number stays flat forever.
Here it is 20 credits a finished minute from a take already batched, plus about four minutes of attention.
One finished minute from a fresh take is about 120 credits. Seven days and 300 credits with no card covers two.
Learning post-production is still a good investment, and the free suite is the right place to do it.
It is not an answer to an empty ad account this quarter. Make two ads here and compare the count.
DaVinci Resolve and Cutroom, row by row
The top two rows go to Resolve, price included. The rest is what the free suite charges once the job starts repeating.
| DaVinci Resolve | Cutroom | |
|---|---|---|
| Price of entry | A free tier exists | Credits after the trial |
| Colour, compositing, audio | Professional standard | Music level only |
| Usable on day one | Real learning curve | Read, mark, export |
| Cut drafted before you start | Empty timeline | Director pass first |
| Coverage on a marked phrase | Source it, drag it, trim it | Highlight, clip lands |
| Cut rebuilds when a line goes | Ripple it yourself | Delete, and it recompiles |
| Cost of the thirtieth ad | Same chain each time | 20 CR and four minutes |
Questions people ask
- Why pay when Resolve is free?
- Only because your hours are not. If you make a handful of videos a month, or you want to learn post-production, the free suite is the better deal. The case for paying starts at twenty repeated vertical ads.
- Can I grade or fix audio in Cutroom?
- No. There is no colour work, no audio repair and no effects. What you filmed is what exports, with captions and coverage added on top.
- Is there a free way to try this?
- Seven days and 300 credits with no card. That is about two finished one-minute ads, since a batch is 100 credits and export is 20 per finished minute.
- Who should walk away?
- Anyone whose next six months are about learning post-production properly. Take the free suite, it is the right classroom. Send the repeated vertical ads here so they stop waiting on the lesson.
Free software bills you in a calendar. Cutroom bills 20 credits a minute and hands back the finished 9:16 ad, captions burned in and coverage on the claim.