Think about the last time you needed to hire someone for a project. Could be video, could be a website redesign, could be anything where the budget matters. You find a company, the work looks great, you're genuinely excited. And you just want a number. A ballpark. Enough to know if this is even worth a phone call.

So you click the pricing tab.

And instead of numbers you get a contact form. Email, phone number, company size, job title. Hand all of that over and maybe, in 3 to 5 business days, someone will call you back to start the conversation about potentially discussing what things might cost.

We always hated that.

The "It Depends" Routine

There's a phrase that gets thrown around in our industry like a get-out-of-jail-free card. "It depends." Someone asks what a two-day shoot costs and the answer is always "well, it depends."

And yeah. It does depend. Every project has different variables. That part is true.

But here's what's also true. Buying a car has a ton of variables. Trim levels, financing, dealer add-ons, trade-in value. Genuinely complicated. And yet you can still check the MSRP online before you ever set foot on a lot. You might not pay that exact number after taxes and registration, but you know immediately whether you're shopping for a Honda or a Porsche. You're not clearing your whole Saturday to test drive something you can't afford.

The "it depends" thing in production isn't always about complexity. A lot of the time it's a strategy. Keep the pricing vague. Get the client on a discovery call. Share the mood boards, paint the creative vision, get them emotionally invested over three weeks of back and forth. And then, once walking away feels like a loss... drop the number.

A lot of shops operate this way. It never sat right with us.

So We Built a Calculator

We put a pricing calculator on our website. Real numbers. No login, no email gate, nobody's gonna call you because you clicked a button. You pick your options, the estimate updates on the screen. Takes about 30 seconds.

And I know what that sounds like from a marketing perspective. We're basically choosing to lose hundreds of top-of-funnel email leads. Every marketing playbook ever written would call that insane.

But those leads? Most of them were never going to hire us anyway. They were browsing. What we traded was a high volume of low-quality contacts for a smaller number of people who already understand the investment and want to have a real conversation about their project.

The calls got better almost immediately.

Sticker Shock Is Real (And We'd Rather You Have It Alone)

Not gonna sugarcoat this. Video production costs money. Good video production costs more money. We broke down the full anatomy of it in why our range goes from 3K to 30K. Pre-production, location scouting, permits, travel, a crew of 10 people who need to eat lunch, the edit, the re-edit when someone changes their mind (which always happens), color grading, sound mixing, exporting in four different aspect ratios by Friday morning.

All of that goes into the number. And we price it all in upfront. We call it "gas included." No surprise invoices showing up two weeks after the shoot because a hard drive needed to be purchased or the day ran an hour long. The number reflects the real cost.

Some people see it and go "oh."

And that's totally fine!! Because here's the thing about sticker shock. Where you experience it changes everything.

Imagine walking into a really nice restaurant for a first date. The waiter hands you this heavy leather-bound menu. You open it up and there are no prices. You have no idea if the scallops are $30 or $130. And you can't ask because... you know. Social pressure. The anxiety completely overrides the experience.

Now imagine you read that same menu online the night before. From your couch. You had the "oh wow" moment in private, processed it, decided it was worth it, and showed up ready to enjoy the meal.

That's what the calculator does. You get to have your honest reaction staring at your laptop instead of on a Zoom call trying to maintain a poker face while someone from our team watches you do math in your head. We've been on both sides of that silence. Nobody enjoys it.

What the Calculator Gives You (And What It Doesn't)

Pick your service type. Number of shoot days. Location. Editing scope. Turnaround time. Add-ons if you need them.

What you get is a range. Not a fixed bid. Because until we actually talk about your project, a range is the honest answer. I'd rather give you an honest range than a fake number that looks clean on a slide deck but blows up three weeks into production.

And I know that's tough for some people. If you're a marketing manager who needs a hard number for a Tuesday budget approval meeting, a range feels frustrating. But a fabricated fixed number is a ticking time bomb. It might get you the green light on Tuesday, but when the real costs show up, suddenly you're in scope creep debates and change order territory and everyone's frustrated.

An honest range forces everyone to deal with reality upfront. Which is uncomfortable for about five minutes and then saves weeks of headaches later.

What the calculator can't do is replace a conversation. An algorithm doesn't know whether your one-day shoot is a quiet executive interview or a multi-camera brand activation in the middle of a crowded street. That gets sorted when we talk.

But when we do talk, we're starting from the same neighborhood. Not different zip codes. The brands who use the calculator before reaching out tend to come in with realistic expectations, which makes everything move faster for both sides.

Why We Operate This Way

We share our prices for the same reason we put our full service list on the site, outline our process, and write detailed breakdowns of what production actually costs. We don't want to waste your time. And honestly we don't want to waste ours either.

It takes 30 seconds on our site to understand what a New York production company charges. That same information used to require weeks of emails, scheduling coordination, and introductory calls where both sides are trying to figure out if the budget even works before anyone says it out loud.

Go try the calculator. Build a fake project. Build a real one. Close the tab and come back in a month. We're not tracking you, we're not retargeting you, nobody's following up.

Whenever you're ready, you'll already know the number. And the conversation can skip straight to the good part... what we're actually going to make together.