Per video, monthly or retainer

There are four common ways somebody will offer to work with you. Per video. A pack of credits you draw down. A monthly arrangement. And the word that has crept in lately, which is worth taking apart on its own.

Compare the fee alongside scope, continuity, availability and what happens in a quiet month. The payment model affects the arrangement, but does not tell you by itself how much care or learning a supplier will bring.

The decision rule, before the reasoning. If you publish on a rhythm, buy a rhythm. If you need one artefact with a date attached, buy the artefact and do not tell yourself it is a strategy.

What does paying per video do to the work?

It defines a piece of work and its price without requiring an ongoing commitment.

The freedom is real and worth having in one case: you need a single thing, once. A launch film, a talk recorded at an event, an advert with a fixed run. It arrives, you part on good terms, and nothing about that is wrong.

A recurring series of separate commissions still needs shared references, files and decisions. Agree how that knowledge carries forward so you are not rebuilding the brief each time.

What do credits and packs change?

They make the commitment flexible and keep the relationship transactional.

The flexibility is genuine. You know what you have bought, you draw on it when you need it, and a quiet month does not feel wasteful, which suits an irregular calendar.

The behaviour is the problem. You count what is left rather than deciding what to make, and a credit near its expiry becomes a reason to produce a video nothing in your business asked for. It also invites the unit argument: what counts as one video, whether the vertical cut is another, whether a reshoot is new. Both sides come out of that one worse disposed to each other.

What does a monthly arrangement buy that a single video cannot?

Continuity, and the accumulation it allows.

The person editing has seen what last month's video did. Your preferences become standing rules instead of requests you repeat. The next brief gets written from the reading of the last video. That is the difference between a series of videos and a channel with a direction, and it cannot be bought in one transaction because it is made of memory.

The cost is flexibility. There will be a month when you have less to say and the arrangement continues regardless, and if it produces nothing but a video made to fill it, you have lost. A quiet month is when the work that is not a video gets done: the planning, the back catalogue, the systems, the repackaging of what already exists. A supplier who cannot describe what a quiet month contains is selling a rhythm they have not thought about.

What has to give for the word "unlimited" to be true?

Something always gives, because capacity is finite and nobody has invented an editor who does not sleep.

The word describes what you may ask for, never what you receive. Usually the give is queue position: everything is accepted and yours waits behind whoever asked first, so the promise is real and the timing is not. Sometimes it is depth, and the work becomes a quick pass rather than a considered one, which is hard to see from outside because both look like a finished video. Occasionally it hides in the definitions, and what you thought was one job turns out to be several.

None of that makes the arrangement dishonest. It makes the word an incomplete description, and the questions worth asking are plain: what happens when several partners ask in the same week, and who decides the order.

Which one fits your publishing rhythm?

Look at what you did over the last year rather than what you intend to do.

If you publish regularly, compare an ongoing scope with repeated commissions. Ask who keeps the record, reviews results and plans ahead, and what each arrangement makes available. Those responsibilities matter more than the label.

If you published rarely, in bursts, around events you do not control, do not take on a monthly commitment to prove seriousness. Commission what you need, keep your material organised so the next supplier starts further along, and come back when the rhythm changes.

What this studio does

BUBI’s ongoing offer is a monthly fee against a written scope. Before that commitment, one separately quoted paid sample lets both sides assess the work and the working relationship.

What the market calls a retainer, we call a monthly investment: a fee set against an agreed scope, billed monthly, not a subscription and not a block of credits drawn down.

The Free Audit comes first. If there is a fit, we scope and quote a paid sample separately. You review the delivered work before deciding whether to agree a monthly scope; there is no automatic commitment to continue.

Nothing gets proposed without looking at the channel first, and the looking is free.

So the question to settle before any conversation about arrangements: are you buying deliverables or a direction, and does the last year, rather than the plan, say you have been buying the first while paying for the second.

Sources and evidence

Our model. A Free Audit; where there is a fit, one separately scoped paid sample, then a monthly agreement with a written scope. The sample does not commit either side to monthly work.