Open Loop/Guides
$0 to $10,000+ a month, and the gap in the middle is where most podcasts actually sit.
Tools are free to about $40. Agencies start around $2,000 and mostly want $3,000–$8,000. Open Loop is $400–$1,200 a month, or roughly $27–$33 a clip.
| Option | Typical price | Who reviews the output |
|---|---|---|
| AI tools | Free – $40 / month | You |
| Freelance editor | $20 – $150 / hour | Depends on the brief |
| Managed service Open Loop | $400 – $1,200 / month | A person, before you see it |
| Full agency | $2,000 – $10,000+ / month | A team, plus strategy |
There is a hole in the middle of this market. Agencies are widely reported to stop making sense below about $3,000 a month — under that, the economics do not work for them and quality slips. But plenty of shows do not need a strategy team, a posting schedule and an attribution report. That gap — above “a tool plus two hours of your week”, well below the agency floor — is the whole reason this service exists.
Reframing to vertical, burning in captions, trimming dead air and even reading the transcript for good moments are all solved problems — software does them in minutes and does them well.
What you pay above the software price is the review. Someone has to go through the candidates, kill the ones that should not go out, fix the timings, and be willing to come back with three clips instead of ten when the episode was thin. That is slow, it does not get faster with volume, and it is the part you would otherwise be doing yourself.
Freelancers price by the hour, not the clip, which makes comparison awkward. Roughly, in 2026:
A single captioned vertical clip is commonly half an hour to an hour of work, so a mid-level editor lands somewhere around $25–$75 a clip. The catch is that the hourly rate buys you editing. Whether anyone is choosing good moments depends entirely on how well you brief them.
A cheap tool where you post six of thirty and spend two hours reviewing costs you very little in subscription and two hours of your week, every week. Whether that beats a managed service depends entirely on what those two hours are worth to you.
| Tier | For | Clips | Price | Per clip |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 1 episode / week | 12 | $400 | $33.33 |
| Growth | 2 episodes / week | 24 | $700 | $29.17 |
| Scale | posting most days | 45 | $1,200 | $26.67 |
Every clip is one a person reviewed and expects you to post. We are not padding the count with near-misses. Every episode gets at least three, whatever its length. A large back catalogue is quoted separately on top of the monthly tier.
The answer to the fourth should be "you do, and not without asking." If a provider hesitates on that, keep looking.
Check before you buy. These figures were checked in September 2026 against published tool pricing, freelance rate surveys and agency pricing guides. Tool pricing in particular moves fast — go to the source before committing money on the basis of any table on any website, including this one.
Bring one to a 20-minute call. If the honest answer is "not much", we will tell you that instead.