How much does a SaaS explainer video cost?

Short answer: an animated SaaS explainer from us runs $215 per finished second, so about $13,000 for 60 seconds and $19,000 for 90, with script, storyboard, design, animation, voice, music, and revisions included. Every quote is fixed after one discovery call. The rest of this post is the long answer: what that buys, what the market charges, what pushes a price up, and the one thing to ask any studio before you sign.

Length	Price at $215 per finished second	What it is usually for
30 seconds	about $6,500	a teaser, a paid social cut, a booth loop
60 seconds	about $13,000	the homepage explainer
90 seconds	about $19,000	a product explainer with a demo section

What the rate includes

The number is per finished second, delivered. It covers the whole process: a script written for your buyer, a storyboard with every frame drawn and approved before anything moves, the design system for the product UI, the animation, a professional voice, licensed music and sound design, and the revision rounds built into each stage. There is no separate line for “creative direction” or “project management.” Those are the job.

It also covers the cutdowns if they are planned at the script stage: a 30-second teaser for paid social, a silent captioned version for LinkedIn, and the full piece for the demo page. Planning them early is nearly free, because the storyboard already contains every frame they need. Adding them after delivery is a new project.

What the market charges

Published prices are all over the map, which is part of why the question gets searched so much. Yum Yum Videos’ cost calculator puts a baseline animated explainer at $6,000 to $15,000 and its top tier at $25,000 to $62,000, depending on style. Demo Duck says the market “can range from $1,500 up to $50,000” and sets its own floor for quality work at $16,000. Clutch’s video production pricing guide, updated September 2026, has most agencies billing $100 to $149 an hour, the most common project landing under $10,000, and a typical timeline of about five months.

Read those three together and the pattern is clear. The low end is a template with your logo on it. The high end is 3D, characters, or an agency markup. The middle, $12,000 to $20,000 for a 60 to 90 second piece from a studio that writes, designs, and animates it, is where most SaaS explainers that actually get used are made. Our rate sits in that middle on purpose, with the timeline at twelve weeks instead of five months.

What moves the number

A few things take a quote above the rate, and all of them show up as line items before you sign anything:

• 3D or character animation. Both roughly double the hours per second over 2D motion design.
• Live-action integration. A shoot day, a crew, and a location change the math, so mixed pieces are scoped on a call and quoted fixed.
• Rush. A full explainer runs on a twelve-week clock, three weeks a stage. Compressing it costs more because it means parallel work, not faster work.
• Extra revision rounds past the ones included at each stage. In practice this is rare when the storyboard was actually reviewed, which is why we insist on it.
• Translations and alternate versions. Priced per version, usually a fraction of the original.

And a few things that do not move the number, which surprises people: the length of the discovery call, the number of stakeholders on the review, and small text or caption changes after delivery.

The $150 subtitle

A client came to us from another studio with a simple story. They needed one line of subtitles changed on a finished video, and the invoice for it was $150. That was the moment they started looking for a new video partner. Not the reel, not the price of the original piece. The change fee.

When people leave their video vendor and call us, it is almost always one of two reasons: they felt overcharged, or the process was not smooth. Rarely the work itself. The $150 subtitle is both reasons in one line item.

Our position is simple. Subtitles are generated in minutes now, and a small change like that is the kind of thing a good partner does because it is easy and it matters to you. We make those changes, within reason, because it shows we are the partner we said we were. If a studio bills you for every small ask after delivery, that tells you how the relationship will feel in year two.

If it is not a SaaS product

The explainer video cost is the same for any animated piece: a fintech onboarding flow, a medical device, a manufacturing process, a nonprofit’s program. The rate is per finished second whatever the subject, and the table above holds. SaaS gets its own post because software explainers carry one extra job, building the product UI as a design system so the video shows the real product instead of describing it, and that is where the hours go. A process or a story with no interface to rebuild tends to land at the same price with more of the budget in illustration and motion.

The question to ask before you sign

“What happens after delivery?” Ask it before you compare rates. A lower per-second number with a change fee behind every request costs more over the life of the video than a fair rate with a partner who picks up the phone. Ask what a caption change costs, what a new end card costs, what a 15-second cutdown costs six months from now. The answers are the real price list.

Sizing the decision

If you are deciding whether an explainer is the right size of spend, the math that matters is not the production cost. It is what the video replaces. A 75-second demo on the homepage that answers “what does this do” before a sales call does the first ten minutes of every call your team takes. Price it against that, not against the studio down the street.

The SaaS video production page shows the work and how the demo, the explainer, and the customer story divide the job. Customer stories are priced differently, per finished second; the testimonial video cost guide covers that. For a sense of structure and length, the demo script template has the six beats and word counts. And if you are weighing an explainer against a brand film or a customer story, the explainer video examples post walks through seven and why each one works.

Tell us the product and the one sentence you want a buyer to remember and we will come back with a length and a fixed quote. No change fee for asking.