Animated production is priced by style and runtime almost entirely, which is good news: it means you can predict the cost before you talk to anyone, if you know which style you actually need.
The four styles, priced by what they require
1. Motion graphics / kinetic type. Text, shapes, icons, data, UI pans. Built from existing assets. This is the cheapest band and the fastest, and it covers most B2B and product use.
Requires: a designer who can animate, your brand kit, and a script.
2. Template or library animation. Character or scene libraries, customised. Cheap per minute, and it looks it: recognisable, slightly generic, fine for internal and explainer volume.
Requires: a template subscription and an editor who knows it.
3. Custom 2D illustration. Original artwork, hand-drawn or vector, animated scene by scene. This is the band most people mean by "an explainer".
Requires: an illustrator and an animator, usually two people, plus storyboard sign-off.
4. Character animation and 3D. Rigged characters, simulated product, cinematic camera moves.
Requires: specialists, render time, and a bigger budget than most briefs anticipate.
The jump from 1 to 3 is the expensive one. Most briefs ask for 3 when 1 would communicate the same idea.
What actually moves the number
- Runtime. Near-linear. A 90-second piece costs roughly 1.5× a 60-second piece at the same style.
- Original illustration. The single largest variable. Custom artwork is per-scene labour.
- Scene count, not seconds. Ten quick cuts cost more than one long held shot.
- Revisions after animation. Cheap at storyboard, brutal at animation. Lock the boards.
- Languages. The voice and on-screen text layer multiplies; the animation does not. Build a text-free master.
Realistic timelines
| Stage | Motion graphics | Custom 2D | Character / 3D |
|---|---|---|---|
| Script | 2–4 days | 3–7 days | 3–7 days |
| Storyboard / style frames | 2–3 days | 5–10 days | 7–14 days |
| Animation | 3–5 days | 10–20 days | 20–40 days |
| Voice, music, mix | 1–2 days | 2–3 days | 3–5 days |
| Revisions | 2–3 days | 3–5 days | 5–10 days |
| Typical total | 1–2 weeks | 3–6 weeks | 6 weeks + |
The pattern worth noticing: script and storyboard are half the calendar in most custom projects. Teams plan for the animation and get caught by the approvals.
Where the money actually goes wrong
Three avoidable failures, in order of frequency:
Approving a script you haven't read aloud. Written copy and spoken copy are different objects. Read it at pace, out loud, before anyone boards it.
Boarding before the message is settled. Storyboards make ideas feel decided. If the claim is still moving, the boards will be redrawn, at storyboard cost and then again at animation cost.
Commissioning animation for volume. If the need is forty product videos, custom animation is the wrong instrument regardless of budget. Cheaper per unit is not the point; the point is that a three-week cycle cannot serve a weekly calendar.
Animated vs AI-assisted, honestly
Custom animation buys craft and a visual world you own. AI-assisted production buys speed and volume, and it will not produce a hand-illustrated character world.
For explainers specifically, AI-assisted work at a published per-asset rate, around $100 a video for SaaS and technical work and from about $70 for base-complexity video, is the volume instrument. It does not replace a bespoke animation for your homepage. It replaces the forty other pages that currently have nothing.
A defensible split: one custom animated piece for the page that converts, AI-assisted volume for everything else.
Per-asset pricing is on the rate card. If you are choosing between animated and live action for the same brief, video agency vs freelancer vs in-house covers the supply side, and explainer video company goes deeper on the explainer format specifically.
Jayesh Jain runs NNI Design Studio. For the format decision behind these numbers, read explainer video company.
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