30-second explainer video: a bill of materials from stills to render

A short explainer built from stills, narration and music is cheap to cost out, because every part has a catalog price. This is the bill for a 30-second cut: six stills, a 450-character script (about 30 seconds at 900 characters a minute), one music track, a transcript to drive captions and the Timeline render.

Sume prices every job at the vendor list price × 1.25, then adds a 5.5% fee on that result, so $1.00 of list becomes $1.31875 (how the formula works). The tables below show both the catalog price (list × 1.25) and the all-in figure with the fee.

Bill of materials

What to change first

The six stills are $0.47 of the $0.69; swapping Ideogram 4.5 medium for Grok Image at list $0.02 would cut that line to $0.16. Do that for backgrounds, and keep Ideogram for the frames that carry text. The render step costs $0.05, so re-rendering a revision is nearly free compared with regenerating images.