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 reel time from its own build ledger, which times two builds on 2026-06-15: about half a day, then about an hour. The ten-minute setup figure is from Kamply's setup guide. Ranges are printed as ranges.

What does Kamply cost?

The full Mac app is $69 a month or $499 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.

Benchmarks

What a 60-second reel actually costs in 2026

9 October 20264 min readThe Kamply team

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 build ledger times two reel builds, both on 2026-06-15. The first took about half a day and the second about an hour. The full app is $69 a month or $499 a year; your subscription price stays flat as volume changes.

Kamply is a Mac app that builds posts and reels with you, on your brand. It works with your own Claude Code or Codex subscription. See pricing.

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 reels (voiceover- or music-timed, 9:16, ready to upload) on your Mac. The app keeps a build ledger, and the sample in it is small, so here is all of it.

The ledger times two reel builds, both logged on 2026-06-15. The first took about half a day and needed four re-render rounds, because the audio and timing faults were found by a person watching the finished video. The second ran after automated checks were added. It took about an hour with one re-render round, and a check caught the audio fault before anyone watched. No reel since then has a wall time logged, and the ledger does not record how long either reel runs.

So about an hour is one build, and we print it as that. The ledger's own target is under 30 minutes with no re-render rounds, and it marks that target as unproven. Setup time is not in the ledger. Kamply's setup guide puts it at about ten minutes, and that guide is the only source for the figure.

Kamply's full app is $69 a month or $499 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.

A vertical frame from a finished reel: a dark teal map of Russia headed 'moscow to vladivostok', with a distance counter and a time-zone tally along the bottom. — A frame from a finished reel, rendered on a demo brand. The build ledger times one reel at about an hour, on 2026-06-15.

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 reel time from its own build ledger, which times two builds on 2026-06-15: about half a day, then about an hour. The ten-minute setup figure is from Kamply's setup guide. Ranges are printed as ranges.
What does Kamply cost?: The full Mac app is $69 a month or $499 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.