How much should short-form content cost a DTC brand?

The four ways to buy it

Short-form content gets bought in four fairly distinct ways, and the ranges below are what they cost going into late 2026:

• DIY AI tools — $30–$220/mo
• Thousand Ads — $50–$1,500 per package
• Freelance creator — $150–$400 per video
• Social agency — $2,000–$30,000/mo

Those are not four prices for the same thing, which is what makes the comparison difficult to run honestly. They are four different divisions of labour.

What the price is actually buying

A DIY tool subscription buys you generation. Everything else — the angles, the scripts, the judgement about which of the twelve outputs is worth spending behind — stays with you. That's genuinely the cheapest option if you have someone in-house who will do it, and genuinely the most expensive if you don't, because the cost lands as unused seats and a folder of files nobody shipped.

A freelance creator buys you a person and a performance. Strategy usually isn't included, and the rights usually expire — see the ownership piece for what that means in practice.

An agency retainer buys you the thinking and the production, plus an account team, plus the overhead of both. It's the right answer at a certain spend level and an expensive answer below it.

The costs that don't appear in the quote

• Usage rights that expire, and the re-licensing fee on whatever ends up working.
• Whitelisting fees, if you want to run the ad from the creator's handle.
• Your own time briefing, reviewing and chasing — the real cost of the cheap options.
• Minimum terms and notice periods on retainers, which turn a three-month trial into a six-month commitment.
• Volume you pay for and never post, which is the standard failure mode of per-video pricing.

A budget that actually works

Start with the smallest amount that produces a real signal, not the smallest amount available. One angle in two variants tells you almost nothing. Two or three angles with a few openings each, run for two weeks with enough spend behind them to clear the noise, tells you what to make next — and that's the point of the exercise.

Then spend the next batch on what the first one taught you rather than on more of everything. The brands that get this wrong aren't the ones spending too little; they're the ones buying volume before they know what they're making volume of.

What we charge

Our packages run $50–$1,500 and every one is a one-off — no retainer, no minimum term, nothing to cancel. The $50 first batch exists so the answer to “does this work for us” costs less than an afternoon. See what's in each package.