Benchmarks
What a 60-second reel actually costs in 2026
The short version
- Agency production: roughly $300–$1,500 per short video on published 2026 rate cards, typically ~48 hours per revision-inclusive turnaround.
- In-house: the US average marketing salary is about $71,545 a year, and filling the seat takes around 42 days. Video skills cost extra on both counts.
- On-machine AI production: Kamply's measured wall time for a finished 60-second reel is about an hour. The full app is $69 a week, $199 a month, or $1,990 a year; your subscription price stays flat as volume changes.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure here is a published benchmark with its source named, and where Kamply's own number would be a guess, this article says so. The same figures, with the same sources, sit on our comparison page, and you can multiply them for your own monthly volume with the reel cost calculator.
The agency route
Published production-agency rate cards (Vidico and D-MAK's 2026 pricing pages are representative) put a short social video at roughly $300 to $1,500 depending on motion complexity and revisions, inside broader retainers that commonly run $2,500 to $10,000 a month (WebFX's agency pricing survey). Turnaround for a single reel with one revision round is typically about 48 hours.
What you're buying is craft and someone else's hours. What you're accepting is the queue, since every revision re-enters it.
A per-asset price is what turns posting weekly into a budget decision.
The in-house route
Glassdoor's US data puts the average marketing salary at about $71,545 a year, before benefits and tools. SHRM and LinkedIn hiring benchmarks put the time to fill a marketing seat at around 42 days. And a generalist marketer often isn't a video editor, so reels either wait for a second specialist hire or come out at whatever quality the timeline software allows.
In-house wins on context and speed of iteration once the person is in the seat. The costs are the seat itself and the months before it's filled.
The on-machine route
Kamply renders finished 60-second reels (voiceover- or music-timed, 9:16, ready to upload) on your Mac. The engine's own build ledger puts the measured wall time for a reel at about an hour, from locked brief to checked MP4. Setup, measured the same way, is about ten minutes.
Kamply's full app is $69 a week, $199 a month, or $1,990 a year. That is a subscription, not a made-up dollars-per-reel figure: your volume changes the time comparison, not the plan price. See every billing pace, or use the walkthrough to test the workflow on your own brand.
How to actually use these numbers
Multiply by your real cadence. At one reel a quarter, the per-asset price is small next to the craft an agency puts into it. At one a week, the queue and the per-asset price become the whole story, and weekly is the cadence social platforms reward. So the comparison is a year of posting every week against a year of deciding, reel by reel, whether this one is worth the midpoint of the range above, about $900.
Questions this post answers
- Where do these numbers come from?
- Agency figures from published rate cards and surveys (Vidico, D-MAK, WebFX); salary from Glassdoor US averages; hiring time from SHRM and LinkedIn benchmarks; Kamply's setup and reel times from its own build ledger. Ranges are printed as ranges.
- What does Kamply cost?
- The full Mac app is $69 a week, $199 a month, or $1,990 a year. Those are founding rates for subscriptions started by the cutoff shown on the pricing page; enterprise onboarding is priced at a walkthrough.
- Is an AI-built reel as good as an agency one?
- It's built to pass the same review you'd give an agency: your brand tokens, hard quality checks, and your approval before anything is called done. The walkthrough exists so you can judge the output on your own brand instead of taking our word.
