A daily YouTube Short for 90 days: $28.80 in render, captions, trim

Short answer

Ninety daily Shorts of 59 seconds cost $28.80 on Sume's documented public rates: $0.32 a day for one trim, one render and one caption job. That figure covers production only. YouTube's help page sets the Shorts monetization bar at 1,000 subscribers and 10 million qualified Shorts views in 90 days (read 2026-10-05), and nothing here changes your odds of reaching it.

The daily recipe

Cut the best 59 seconds from a longer clip with video trim at $0.02 a job. Render the final 1080x1920 file in Timeline 1.0 at $0.10 per ceil(output minute), where 59 seconds rounds up to 1 billable minute. Burn captions with video captions at $0.20 per job for a video up to 60 seconds. Staying at 59 seconds keeps both the render and the caption jobs in their cheapest bracket; 61 seconds would be 2 billable minutes.

The 90-day arithmetic

Rates are the public figures in the docs. Confirm them in GET /v1/catalog.

Check the sum in code

A few lines recompute the totals so you can change the rates or the day count and see the effect. Using whole cents avoids floating-point noise.

import math

rates = {"trim": 2, "render": 10, "captions": 20}  # cents
seconds, days = 59, 90
minutes = math.ceil(seconds / 60)
daily = rates["trim"] + rates["render"] * minutes + rates["captions"]
print("per short $%.2f, total $%.2f" % (daily / 100, daily * days / 100))

What the numbers do not say

The YouTube page also says a view counts when a Short starts or replays, with no minimum watch time since 3/31/2025. If every one of the 10 million views had to come from your 90 Shorts, that would be about 111,111 views per Short on average. That is arithmetic, not a forecast: views also come from older uploads, and the threshold is only one of the requirements.

If you would rather spend the same money differently, $28.80 is 144 caption jobs or 288 renders. The cheaper habit is to batch: plan a week of Shorts, run the plan calls for free, and render them with one key per day.

Cost control is mostly about length. Going from 59 to 61 seconds doubles the render line, from $0.10 to $0.20, because the rate rounds up to whole minutes, and it moves the caption job out of the bracket the docs price. If your Short sits at 62 seconds because of a long outro, trimming 2 seconds saves $0.10 on the render alone, which over 90 days is $9.00.

For a first week, run the numbers on 7 Shorts, which is $2.24 on the same rates, and compare it to what you spend in time on the manual version. Set the length first and the tooling second: a 45-second Short is still 1 billable minute, so going shorter than 60 seconds saves nothing on the render, and staying at or under it is what keeps the line at $0.10.

If your daily Short is a clip of the day, the three steps can run from one script: trim, render, caption. Give each its own Idempotency-Key built from the date, and a retry on a bad day will not create a second bill.