Nobody in this industry publishes prices, which makes it very hard to work out whether you are being quoted fairly. So here are the real ranges in Toronto right now, including ours, and the honest trade-offs of each route.
The four ways to get short-form video made
1. Do it yourself
Cost: your time, plus maybe $50 a month in apps.
Genuinely viable for a solo operator with natural on-camera ability and a few hours a week. The failure mode is not quality, phones are extraordinary now. The failure mode is consistency. Almost everyone who starts this way stops within eight weeks, because filming and editing are the first things to drop when your actual job gets busy.
If you are going to do this, the honest test is whether you can post twice a week for two months straight. If not, buy the consistency from someone else.
2. A freelance editor
Cost: roughly $40 to $120 per edited video in Toronto.
You film, they cut. This is the cheapest way to get a professional finish and it works well if you are comfortable on camera and have a clear idea of what you want made.
What you are not buying is strategy. A freelance editor executes your idea. If the idea is weak, you get a beautifully cut video that nobody watches. Most people who plateau with a freelancer plateau because the concepts, not the edits, were the bottleneck.
3. Hiring in-house
Cost: $55,000 to $80,000 salary for a decent videographer-editor in Toronto, plus roughly $8,000 to $15,000 in gear, plus software, plus management time.
All-in you are looking at $70,000 to $100,000 in year one.
The upside is real: someone who knows your business intimately and is available on demand. The downsides are the ones people underestimate. One person is one skill set, and shooting, editing, writing hooks, designing thumbnails and understanding distribution are genuinely different jobs. You are also carrying the cost in slow months, and if they leave, your content stops that week.
In-house makes sense when your volume is high enough to keep one person genuinely busy, which in our experience is somewhere north of 16 to 20 finished videos a month.
4. An agency retainer
Cost: $2,000 to $12,000+ per month in Toronto, depending heavily on volume and production level.
For context, our own retainers start around $2,000 a month for personal-brand clients and scale with output.
What the range actually reflects:
| Monthly spend | Roughly what it buys |
|---|---|
| $2,000 to $3,500 | Personal brand, 4 to 8 videos, one shoot day, strategy and posting |
| $4,000 to $7,000 | Business account, 8 to 16 videos, multiple shoot days, multi-platform |
| $8,000+ | High volume or high production, ongoing shoots, full distribution |
Be sceptical of anything under about $1,500 a month that promises real volume. The maths does not work unless the work is being offshored or templated, and you will see it in the output.
The comparison nobody runs properly
The mistake is comparing an agency retainer to a salary. That is not the real comparison, because one person does not replace a team.
Here is the closer version, for a business wanting roughly 16 videos a month:
| In-house hire | Agency retainer | |
|---|---|---|
| Year one cost | $70,000 to $100,000 | $48,000 to $84,000 |
| People on it | 1 | Director, shooter, editor, strategist |
| Ramp-up | 4 to 8 weeks | First shoot inside 2 weeks |
| If they leave | Content stops | Not your problem |
| Slow months | Still paying full | Adjustable or cancellable |
Where in-house genuinely wins: very high volume, a need for same-day turnaround, or a brand so specific that the learning curve is worth owning permanently.
Where an agency wins: you want more than one skill set, you want it running next month rather than next quarter, and you do not want to become a content manager on top of your actual job.
What actually drives the price
Two things, mostly.
Shoot days. Filming is the expensive part. An agency that shoots one full day and produces 12 to 16 videos from it will always be cheaper per video than one shooting weekly. Ask how many videos come out of a shoot day. It tells you more about pricing than any rate card.
Whether strategy is included. Some retainers are production only, you supply the ideas. Others include concepting, hook writing and distribution. These are very different products at similar prices, and the difference shows up in results, not invoices.
Questions worth asking any agency
- How many videos come out of one shoot day?
- Who writes the hooks, and can I see examples that performed?
- Do you post and manage distribution, or just deliver files?
- What is the revision process, and is it capped?
- Can I see numbers from a client in my industry?
That last one matters most. Anyone can show you a nice-looking video. Ask what it did.
If you want to see ours, the portfolio has the view counts attached to every piece, and the case studies explain what each one actually changed for the business.