How much do podcast clips cost in 2026?

Clip pricing is strangely hard to find for something this widely sold. Plenty of providers quote a monthly figure that bundles clips in with everything else, which makes it impossible to tell whether you are paying £15 or £150 for each one. Others quote per clip but will not say what a clip includes, which amounts to the same problem.

So here are actual numbers, what changes them, and an honest accounting of the alternative where you do it yourself. Our prices are on this page because we publish them anyway, not because this is a sales argument. Take them as a benchmark to hold other quotes against.

How much does a podcast clip cost in 2026?

With us, £35 for a standard clip and £65 for an advanced one, priced individually rather than in a bundle. No VAT, billed per four-week cycle, no minimum term.

The difference between those two numbers is worth spelling out, because "clip" is doing a lot of work as a word.

Most shows run standard as the workhorse and use advanced selectively. A common pattern among our clients is one advanced clip and two standard ones per episode: the advanced cut carries the week's strongest moment, the standard ones keep the feed alive around it.

What actually drives the price of a clip?

Not length, which is the first thing people assume. A ninety-second clip and a thirty-second clip take a broadly similar amount of work, because the expensive parts scale with the number of decisions rather than the number of seconds.

Reframing is the biggest single cost. A 16:9 conversation does not crop itself into a vertical frame. Somebody has to decide, shot by shot, where the frame sits: which speaker holds centre, when to move because the other person reacted, how to keep a gesture from being cut off at the wrist. Done properly this is the majority of the work in a standard clip, and it is the thing automatic tools do worst, because they centre-crop and hope.

Caption work. Captions are not a transcription problem, they are a timing problem. Text has to land with the speech rather than a beat behind it, break in places that read naturally, and sit inside every platform's safe zones so no line ends up hidden behind a like button. Motion captions on the advanced tier add another layer: deciding which single line in the clip deserves emphasis is an editorial judgement, not an effect.

Sound design and B-roll, on the advanced tier. A music bed cut to the rhythm of the speech means actually cutting to the speech, not laying a loop underneath. B-roll means finding or making footage for the moments where a talking head goes visually flat. These are the hours that separate the two prices.

Render and delivery, which is less trivial than it sounds. One finished clip from a recent episode came out at 238MB for about 106 seconds of video. Finished short-form is heavy, and it has to be exported, checked and put somewhere the client will actually find it. On one project we inherited, the only finished captioned vertical clip in the entire job turned up inside a captioning tool's render cache rather than in any delivery folder. It had been made competently and then effectively lost.

What does not drive the price: the number of platforms. One 9:16 master works across TikTok, Reels and Shorts, so nobody should be charging you three times for the same clip in three places.

Is it cheaper to make clips yourself?

Cheaper in cash, expensive in the currency you are usually shorter of.

Budget roughly an hour per clip once you are competent, and materially more while you are learning. That hour is not spent on the clever parts. It goes on scrubbing the episode to find the moment, trimming into it so it starts on the substance, reframing every shot, fixing caption timing that landed slightly off, and exporting twice because the first render had the captions clipping the bottom safe zone. Multiply by three clips a week and you have bought back a working day a month.

Automatic clipping tools are genuinely cheaper and genuinely worse, and it is worth understanding precisely why rather than treating it as snobbery. They work from a transcript, so they cut at sentence boundaries. That means they routinely open a clip on the throat-clearing sentence rather than the sharp one, and they cannot see anything that lives between the words: the pause before a punchline, the laugh that actually lands, the moment a guest stops performing and says the honest version. A transcript does not record any of that. An editor watching the episode does.

The most expensive option, though, is neither. It is gathering material for clips and never finishing them. We have seen an archive where dozens of files were carefully exported and labelled for short-form, sat at between 655MB and nearly 2GB each, and were never cut into anything at all. Every hour that went into producing them returned nothing. If you are going to do it yourself, do fewer and finish them.

What does a month of clips actually cost?

Some worked examples using our live numbers, so you can see how it lands rather than trusting a "from" price.

Three standard clips on a single episode in a cycle comes to £105. Add the base edit at £280 and that episode is £385 all in, before any artwork.

A weekly show taking four episodes in a cycle, each with three standard clips, is £1,120 of editing plus £420 of clips, which is £1,540 before the crew rate. At three or more episodes in a cycle the crew rate takes 10% off, so it settles at £1,386. That is the discount applying to the whole package rather than to the clips alone.

You can also buy clips on their own, with no episode edit at all, cut from a recording you already have. Eight standard clips in a cycle with no base edit is £280. This is genuinely useful if you edit your own show but have never got round to short-form, and it is the option most providers do not offer because it does not lock you into anything.

None of those figures carries VAT, none of them requires a minimum term, and all of them are visible on the configurator where you can move the numbers yourself and watch the total change. If you want to see the two tiers cut from the same moment before deciding which you need, that comparison is on the short-form clips page.

Where do you go from here?

Work out your real per-clip number before you compare anything. Take any monthly quote you have been given, subtract what the editing alone would cost, divide the remainder by the number of clips, and see what you are actually paying. Providers whose bundles do not survive that arithmetic usually resist doing it with you.

Then decide the mix deliberately. If short-form is how strangers find your show, advanced clips earn their extra £30. If clips are there to keep the feed warm between episodes, standard is the right tool and spending more is a waste. For the wider picture of what else an episode can become, we set that out in one episode, fifteen assets.

And if you would like us to cut them, build the package on the configurator or book a 15-minute call. The prices there are the prices, this week and next.