Ask ten brands what their post-production costs per finished minute. You will get ten shrugs. The number is obscured inside agency retainers, producer fees, pass-through invoices, overage memos, and the polite fiction of 'included in scope.' The truth is boring and specific, and most shops would rather it stayed that way.
Where the money quietly goes
- Overhead allocated from untouched studio square footage.
- Senior editor time billed on junior editor work.
- Revision rounds priced as scope rather than as rework.
- Format conversions quoted after the fact.
- Rush fees that materialize the day the deck gets shown upstairs.
None of this is fraud. It is just how the industry absorbs uncertainty. When the provider cannot predict their own margin, the client pays the risk premium. Predictability, in other words, is a product that has not been on the menu.
The argument for a cap
When we set a ceiling on per-project pricing — a cap, not a subscription — we were telling ourselves something operationally. If we cannot deliver inside that envelope, the problem is our process, not your project. Caps force a studio to own its own efficiency. They also change the emotional shape of the working relationship. A cap is a promise that surprises flow in one direction only.
“If the invoice can grow indefinitely, the scope always will.”
What a predictable number unlocks for clients
- Finance can forecast post across a full quarter without contingency theater.
- Creative can greenlight more experiments because the downside is bounded.
- Producers stop negotiating change orders and start shipping work.
- Agencies can fold predictable post into flat production bids without bleeding.
Where this does not work
A cap is not a race to the bottom. It presumes a studio tall enough to absorb the occasional overrun without cutting quality. That is the other side of the discipline — senior editors, small teams, infrastructure that scales against revisions, not against headcount. Without that, a cap becomes a trap for the provider and, eventually, for the client.
Done properly, the cap is the least interesting part of the arrangement. The interesting part is that the conversation moves, finally, from what the edit costs to what the edit says.
