I priced one 10-minute faceless video 6 different ways. The honest spread is $35 to $4,000.

Every week someone here asks what faceless YouTube actually costs before it earns anything, and the answers are always either "basically free" or "thousands." Both are wrong, and both push people out. I run faceless long-form channels (history and finance), so I sat down and priced the same 10-minute video every way I know how.

1. Full DIY with free tools. Cash cost near zero. Time cost 30+ hours per video across research, script, voiceover, visuals, editing. Your time is the real bill.
2. The subscription stack. One tool for visuals, one for voice, one for editing. $60-100 a month across subscriptions, and you still spend hours gluing the pieces together yourself.
3. Outsourcing. Freelancers quote $100-300 per finished long-form video. Quality is a lottery, and at 4 videos a month the math turns ugly fast.
4. Short-form AI clips. When I started I was burning about $15 per 45-second short once you count the failed attempts. Scale that to 10 minutes and it hurts.
5. Credit-based platforms. There's a review going around of a guy who spent about $4,000 on VidRush before earning anything back. Platform markup is the silent killer, you never see what the compute actually costs.
6. Raw compute on your own cloud. This is what I ended up building for myself. You connect your own Google account, Google gives every new account $300 in free credits which realistically covers your first 6-10 full videos, and after that a long-form video runs $35-55 in real compute. The bill sits in your own dashboard, no markup.

Honest caveat, because this sub will smell BS: cheap compute doesn't make a video good. You can produce complete garbage at $35 a pop if the topic and script are lazy. Cost just decides how many attempts you can afford while you learn.

If you want to poke at what I built: https://openvidi.com

Question for the sub: what are you actually paying per video right now, in time or money? My theory is that everyone quoting "free" just isn't counting their hours.