What an In-House Video Person Actually Costs

The salary is the easy part. Let's say $65,000-$85,000 depending on your market. Cool.

Now add the stuff everyone forgets.

Equipment. A decent camera setup, lighting, audio, a computer that can actually handle editing. You're looking at $15,000-$25,000 upfront, and that stuff needs replacing or upgrading every 2-3 years.

Software. Creative Cloud alone is like $660 a year. Add in motion graphics tools, stock footage subscriptions, music licensing, storage solutions. Another $3,000-$5,000 annually at minimum.

And then there's the invisible cost. Time. Your one video person is now doing pre-production, shooting, editing, color, sound, motion graphics, and uploading to 6 platforms. That person is working on one project at a time, and if they're sick or on vacation... everything stops.

This isn't me bashing in-house hires. I love a good in-house creative. But the true loaded cost of one full-time video person is somewhere between $95,000 and $130,000 a year when you factor in everything. Most brands don't realize that until they're already committed.

The Range Problem

Here's something nobody talks about. One person has one style. One skill set. One perspective.

Need a talking head interview with nice lighting? Your in-house person probably crushes that. Need a multi-camera event shoot with live switching? That's a totally different skill set. Need cinematic b-roll for a brand campaign? Different again. Need commercial photography for the same project? Now you're hiring someone else anyway.

A production company brings a full crew scaled to the project. Different shooters, different editors, different energy depending on what the project needs. You're not paying for one person's range. You're paying for the right team every time.

Check out what that looks like in practice on our work page.

When In-House Makes Total Sense

I'm not gonna sit here and pretend a production company is always the answer. There are situations where in-house is clearly the move.

If you're producing daily social content that needs to be reactive and fast. Like, same-day turnaround stuff. That's in-house territory.

If you have a founder or CEO who's constantly creating content and needs someone by their side. Makes sense.

If your brand has a very high volume of simple, repeatable content needs. Product shots, quick tutorials, internal comms. One person can absolutely own that.

The key word there is "repeatable." When the content is predictable and the quality bar is consistent, in-house works great.

The Hybrid Model (This Is the One)

The smartest brands I've worked with do both. And they don't see it as a compromise... they see it as a system.

In-house handles the daily stuff. Social clips, internal videos, quick-turn content. The stuff that needs to be fast and doesn't need a full crew.

A production company handles the projects that need to look and feel like a real production. Campaign videos, brand activations, hero content, anything client-facing where the stakes are high.

The math on this actually works out better than going all-in on either side. You're not overpaying for a full-time person to sit around between big projects, and you're not overpaying a production company for stuff your in-house person could do in their sleep.

Read about how pre-production planning makes production company shoots way more efficient. And if you want to see how to frame the ROI of either approach for leadership, we wrote about that too.

So What's the Actual Answer

Run the real numbers. Not just the salary. The equipment, the software, the time, the opportunity cost of having one person try to be everything.

Then look at what you actually need. Volume or range? Speed or production value? Daily content or quarterly campaigns?

Most brands that do this honestly end up somewhere in the middle. And that's not a cop-out answer. It's just the one that makes the most financial sense once you stop pretending the comparison is apples to apples.