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One to five thousand dollars a minute, and most of it is not the drawing.
Updated: 2026-09-10
For a scripted, illustrated, narrated whiteboard video, agency quotes generally land between one thousand and five thousand dollars per finished minute. Freelancers on marketplaces go lower, often two hundred to eight hundred a minute, usually by reusing a stock asset library. Turnaround is one to three weeks for a first cut, plus a revision round. A two-minute video at the middle of that range is about four thousand dollars and a month of calendar time.
Not where clients expect. Scripting is usually ten to twenty per cent, illustration thirty to forty, and the largest single share is timing and revision: aligning the drawing to the narration and then redoing sections when the script changes. This is why agencies price per minute rather than per drawing, and why a script change after illustration costs so much. It invalidates the timing work, not just the picture.
Three things, and it is worth knowing which one you need. Judgement about what to say, which is worth paying for on a positioning video or a launch film. Illustration in a specific house style, which matters when the video sits next to existing brand work. And project management, which is what you are buying when the video has five stakeholders and a legal review.
A flagship video that will run for years and represents the company. A style that must match an existing brand system precisely. A production with real constraints such as regulatory review, named talent, or licensed music. Anything where being wrong is expensive and someone needs to be accountable for it.
Volume. A training library of forty SOP videos, a course with a video per lesson, a channel that publishes weekly, a product that ships features monthly. At those volumes agency pricing is not a budget question, it is a structural one: the videos will never be updated, because updating means re-quoting. Teams in this position almost always end up with a library that is quietly out of date.
Generate the video, then spend a fraction of the agency budget on the script. The script is the part where human judgement compounds and the part that costs least to change. A writer who knows the subject and one afternoon of iteration gets you most of the value of a studio at a small percentage of the cost, because the expensive part, timing the drawing to the voice, no longer takes a person.
Ask three questions. How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as a round. Are the illustrations drawn for this video or taken from a library, which decides whether your video looks like the last one they made. And who owns the source files, because if you do not, every future edit is a new quote.
From an agency, roughly two to ten thousand dollars depending on the studio, with one to three weeks of turnaround. From a freelancer, four hundred to sixteen hundred, usually with library artwork.
Because the dominant cost is timing the drawing to the narration, which scales with duration rather than with the number of drawings.
They can be, if you accept that the artwork comes from a shared library, which means your video will resemble other videos made with the same tool.
Changing the script after illustration has started. It invalidates the timing work as well as the artwork.
Ask before signing. Many studios keep them, which makes every future edit a new engagement.
The script. It is where subject knowledge shows and where changes are cheapest.