Caption tools bill per clip, so count last month first

You upload a clip, the tool transcribes and styles the captions, and the plan allows a certain number of those a month. Read the live page for the current tiers, because both the counts and the gates move.

Two constraints run at once. The volume you need, and the feature you cannot work without. Brand-consistent styling, longer clips and export options often sit above the volume tier a solo creator would pick.

Buy the higher of the two tiers and know which one forced the decision. If it was the feature, your volume headroom is decoration you are paying for.

The unit here is friendlier than most, because a clip is a thing you can count in your own analytics rather than a quantity you have to model.

Open your own account and count the last thirty days. That takes ninety seconds and it is the single most useful thing on this page.

One clip a week is about four a month. Three a week is thirteen. Daily is thirty, and daily is a cadence most accounts describe as their plan and few sustain past six weeks.

The gap between the intended number and the counted number is where over-buying lives. Buy for the counted number and top up when the counted number changes, because it is easier to move up a tier than to recover a quiet quarter.

If the count is under about ten, check whether the free tier covers you. A specialist captioning tool at low volume is often a habit rather than a purchase.

Captioning is the last stage. Everything before it stays yours: deciding what to say, recording it, choosing which take survives, and cutting it so the point arrives early.

That matters because a caption tool measured against those minutes looks cheap and against the finished ad looks incomplete. Twenty minutes of hand-captioning becoming ninety seconds is a real saving, and it is a saving on the fastest stage of the job.

So the honest question before buying is where your own minutes go. If most of them go into styling text, this is the correct purchase and you will feel it in week one.

If most of them go into deciding the structure, a captioning tool leaves that untouched and you will be back on this search in two months looking for something else.

Five clients at ten clips a month is fifty clips, and the tier that covers a solo creator does not survive contact with that number.

Ask two questions before an agency purchase. Does the plan allow separate brand styling per client, and does it allow the client to review without consuming a seat or a clip? Those two decide whether the tool scales with your roster.

Watch for the tier where per-seat pricing starts, because at that point your bill tracks headcount rather than output. An agency with three editors and six approvers pays for nine people to do three people's work.

The workaround is boring and effective: one creation account, finished files shared out, approvals happening wherever your clients already live.

The other way to buy this stage is to stop buying it separately.

A batch is 100 credits and covers transcription, the director pass and the b-roll search. Captions are burned in as part of the export, which bills 20 credits per output minute. A thirty-second ad is 110 credits end to end, captions included rather than added.

Six packs ship: clean-ugc, bold-impact, karaoke-flow, editorial, fast-native and minimal-lux. Colour, weight, size and position are yours, and you can emphasise a word so it pops.

The cut arrives with them. B-roll lands on the phrases you mark, the dead half seconds come out, and the pace is a setting rather than an evening. That is the stage a clip meter starts after.

The trial is 7 days and 300 credits with no card. Basic is $39.99 a month for 2,500 credits, which is about twenty-two ads from twenty-two separate takes, and Premium is $79.99 for 5,000.

The plain facts beside those numbers: one filmed take, three minutes at the ceiling, 9:16 only, and six packs rather than an open styling system.