Explainer Video Cost: What Five Studios Actually Publish

Short answer: published explainer video prices run from about $497 for an AI-generated 60 second piece to $50,000 and up for premium custom animation, with mid-market custom 2D landing around $2,500 to $10,000. Those numbers are not comparable, because the five studios publishing them meter the work five different ways: per finished second, per labor hour, per animation style, per video type, and per single flat band. The one figure that makes them comparable is scene count, and the only document that fixes scene count is the script.

Ask four explainer video companies what a 60 second video costs and you will get $497, $3,500, $8,000 and $16,000. All four are quoting real work, and none of them is being evasive.

The spread survives because a video is not a unit. Minutes are not a unit either, which is the assumption most cost guides quietly run on. What you are actually buying is a number of scenes rendered to a level of finish, and no two vendors count those the same way.

Everything below was read from the vendors' own published pages on 10 September 2026 and is credited to whoever published it, rather than averaged into a single number that belongs to nobody.

How much does an explainer video cost?

Between roughly $500 and $50,000, and the honest version of that answer is a table rather than a midpoint. Here is what five explainer video companies publish on their own sites.

One note on sourcing. Wyzowl's guide is one of the most cited pages on this topic and its own title still carries 2024. We could not load the page from our end to check whether the figures inside have been refreshed, so we have not quoted it here. If you are budgeting from a number you found in a roundup, it is worth checking which year the original was written in.

Why the published ranges disagree by thirty times

Because each studio is counting a different thing. Line the five meters up next to each other and the disagreement stops looking like disagreement.

This matters when you collect quotes. A studio pricing per finished second and a studio pricing per labor hour will respond to completely different requests. Ask the first one to shorten the video and the price drops. Ask the second one the same thing and it barely moves, because a shorter video with the same number of distinct visuals still needs those visuals built.

Explainer video cost per minute, and why the second minute is cheaper

Three of the five publish something about how price scales with length, and they agree, which is unusual enough to be worth acting on.

So the per-minute rate is a starting rate, not a multiplier. Take IdeaRocket's $4,000 to $25,000 per minute and apply Piehole's 50 percent rule: a 90 second video costs about 1.25 times a 60 second one, not 1.5 times. A two minute video costs about 1.5 times, not double.

The practical consequence runs the other way from what most people assume. If you genuinely need 90 seconds of explanation, buying 90 seconds is better value per second than buying 60. What you should not do is let the video drift to 90 seconds because nobody decided. The setup costs are front-loaded, and the discount only exists because they already got paid on the first minute.

What is actually in the bill

Piehole TV publishes the labor breakdown for a 60 second animated explainer, which almost nobody in this category does. It is the most useful thing on any of the five sites.

Total: 150 to 200 hours for one minute of finished video. Piehole's own illustration puts a floor under it by multiplying the low end by a $20 hourly rate to reach roughly $3,000, which is why quotes below about $2,500 usually mean either template work or offshore labor rather than a better deal on the same thing.

Now look at the top and bottom rows together. Scripting is 7 percent of the hours. Animation and design is 63 percent. And the thing that determines how many hours land in that 63 percent row is how many distinct scenes the script asks for, because each scene is an illustration, a character, a background or a transition that somebody builds from nothing.

Divide 95 animation hours by a typical twelve scene, 60 second script and you get roughly eight hours of animation labor per scene you wrote. That division is ours rather than Piehole's, and it is a rough figure, but the direction is not in doubt. Adding a scene is expensive. Cutting one is free, and it is only free while the script is still a document.

Animated explainer video cost by style

Style is the single biggest lever on the bill after runtime, and two of the five publish style-by-style bands. They broadly line up.

Screencast is the row worth staring at if you sell software. It is the cheapest option on the table by an order of magnitude, and for a product whose value is visible on screen it is frequently the most convincing option too, because the viewer is watching the actual thing rather than an illustration of it. The reason studios rarely lead with it is that there is very little for a studio to bill.

Two costs sit outside the style bands and catch people out. Piehole puts stock footage at around $1,000 per 60 seconds, and Video Explainers prices professional human voiceover at $200 to $1,000 separately from the video. Neither is usually in the headline number.

AI explainer video cost versus a studio

Video Explainers is the only one of the five publishing an AI tier next to its human tier, which makes the gap legible: $497 to $1,997 for an AI explainer against $2,500 to $10,000 for custom 2D. Roughly a fifth of the price, delivered in 3 to 5 days instead of 2 to 4 weeks.

What you give up is specificity. AI generation is strong on generic scenes and weak on the exact thing your product does on screen, which is usually the scene that has to work. A reasonable split for a small team: AI or screencast for the how-it-works section where the real interface can carry it, and custom work only if the concept genuinely needs an illustrated metaphor.

The other question worth asking before you spend anything is how many places the finished video will run. A single $8,000 asset that lives on one landing page is worse value than a $3,000 one you deliberately cut into a dozen channel-native pieces, and turning one asset into every channel costs far less than commissioning each version. Ask for the project files and the raw scene exports in the contract, not after delivery.

How to make three quotes actually comparable

Quotes vary this much partly because briefs vary this much. Studios are filling in the gaps you left, and each one fills them differently, so you end up comparing five different projects rather than five prices for one project.

Four decisions collapse the spread, and none of them requires a creative background. Fix the runtime to an exact number of seconds rather than a range. Fix the scene count, because that is the line the 63 percent animation row bills against. Fix the style, since it moves the price more than anything else on this page. And fix the deliverables list, meaning every cut, every aspect ratio and whether you receive the project files.

All four of those live in one document, and it is the script. A timed, scene-by-scene script sent to three studios comes back as three prices for the same work. A paragraph describing what you want comes back as three prices for three different projects. Studios generally welcome this, because scope creep is their risk as much as yours.

That document is what UGCMarketplace generates. Describe the product, the audience and the runtime, and you get the timed scene list, the voiceover line for each scene, the on-screen action beside it, and the brief covering deliverables and technical spec, in about a minute. The first one is free with no account and it is $29 a month after that. We write the words and nothing else: no animation, no studio, no footage. The format and the worked examples are on our explainer video script page.

The short version

Budget by scenes, not by minutes. Expect $2,500 to $10,000 for custom 2D at 60 seconds, well under that for screencast or AI, and $15,000 and up once you are into 3D or premium animation. Remember that the second minute is roughly half the price of the first, so decide the runtime deliberately rather than letting it drift. Add voiceover and stock footage on top of the headline band. Check the date on any figure you found in a roundup. And write the script before you ask for quotes, because it is 7 percent of the labor and it sets the 63 percent. If the video is going to be filmed by a real person rather than animated, the rates for that are in how much UGC content costs, and the Amazon-specific version is in Amazon product videography rates.