Agency pricing: the premium tier
A professional explainer video agency typically charges from around $3,000 for a simple animated explainer to $20,000 or more for a bespoke, character-driven production. You are paying for strategy, custom illustration, professional animation and voice talent, plus project management — and you wait four to eight weeks.
This tier makes sense for a single flagship brand video where production value is the point. It does not scale to the many explainers most teams actually need.
Freelance pricing: the middle ground
Hiring freelancers on marketplaces can bring a simple explainer down to a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars. The trade-off is coordination and consistency: you are managing a scriptwriter, an illustrator, an animator and a voice artist yourself, and quality varies. Revisions still cost money and add days.
Freelance works for occasional videos if you have the time to manage the process and vet the quality.
DIY software: the subscription tier
Drag-and-drop tools like the older whiteboard and animation apps charge a monthly or annual subscription and let you build videos yourself. The software cost is modest, but the real cost is your time — each polished video can take hours to assemble by hand.
This is cheaper than an agency, but the per-video time cost is the hidden expense.
AI: the lowest cost per video
AI tools like Whiteboard Video collapse both the money and the time cost. For a low monthly subscription you can generate unlimited explainer videos — the AI writes the script, illustrates the scenes and narrates the video, so there is no per-video labour and no revision fees.
The effective cost per video drops toward zero as you make more, which is why AI has become the default for teams that need explainer video regularly rather than once.
What you should actually pay
Match the spend to the stakes. For a once-a-year hero brand film, an agency's fee can be justified. For product explainers, feature videos, onboarding, ads and social — the bulk of real-world explainer needs — an AI tool gives you 90% of the value at a tiny fraction of the cost, instantly.
A sensible approach for many teams: use AI for the steady stream of everyday videos, and reserve a bigger budget for the rare showpiece.
Summary
Here is everything below, distilled into a few lines:
- Agency pricing: the premium tier: A professional explainer video agency typically charges from around $3,000 for a simple animated explainer to $20,000 or more for a bespoke, character-driven production.
- Freelance pricing: the middle ground: Hiring freelancers on marketplaces can bring a simple explainer down to a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars.
- DIY software: the subscription tier: Drag-and-drop tools like the older whiteboard and animation apps charge a monthly or annual subscription and let you build videos yourself.
- AI: the lowest cost per video: AI tools like Whiteboard Video collapse both the money and the time cost.
- What you should actually pay: Match the spend to the stakes.