Hire an editor or automate: the arithmetic at thirty clips a month

The decision is rarely made on numbers, which is why it is usually made badly. Here is the same volume priced three ways, including the costs that never make it into the estimate.

The three options at thirty clips

Those are short-clip numbers. If you also publish long-form, editors price it per finished minute, and the math changes: see what a finished minute of editing costs.

The line item nobody budgets

Review. One round of notes across thirty clips is a working day of somebody's attention, and it is the step that breaks publishing schedules more often than the editing itself. In-house solves speed and introduces a different problem: an editor needs a full queue to be worth a salary, which lands somewhere around forty to fifty clips a month.

Where a human is clearly better

• Launch films and brand pieces shot with a crew and a storyboard.
• Formats where the edit is the joke or the craft: comedy timing, music sync.
• Multicam work with real sound design.
• Anything reviewed frame by frame against somebody else's brand book.

Where a human loses

At thirty near-identical talking-head clips a month, the manual column is paying craft rates for assembly-line work. That is the whole argument, and it reverses cleanly the moment the work stops being repetitive.

The hybrid that usually wins

Automate the cadence, hire for the exception. One or two pieces a month get a human, everything else runs through the pipeline. The editor is not fired; they are moved to the work that is actually worth their rate, which is a better deal for both sides than thirty routine edits.

Where Monty fits

Monty takes one raw take and returns a finished clip: dead air, retakes and filler words cut, captions synced to speech, music ducked under the voice, b-roll by meaning, audio cleaned, a version per platform, then published to YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok and Telegram. It does not film and it does not think of the idea. It replaces the repeated middle, which is what the invoice is mostly for.