What to Charge Clients for Video Upscaling (Freelance Math)

Pricing upscaling as a service goes wrong in one of two ways. Either the quote is built from a feeling, and the job runs at a loss nobody notices until the month ends. Or the quote is built from the hourly rate, and the client compares it to a filter they think is free.

This post does the first half properly. The credit cost of a job is arithmetic, and the published rates are enough to build a floor under every quote. The second half, what to add on top, is a judgment call. I will label it as mine.

The number that is not an opinion

A video upscale is billed per second of source footage, not per file. The rate depends on the target resolution and the model. On the standard model the published rates are 9 credits per second at 720p, 9 at 1080p, 17 at 2K and 33 at 4K. The Ultimate model is 131 credits per second at 4K.

Three billing rules set the floor:

• Duration rounds up to whole seconds.
• Anything under five seconds bills as five seconds.
• A single clip is capped at ten minutes.

So a 32-second clip bills as 32 seconds, a 4.2-second clip bills as 5, and a 14-minute clip bills as 10 minutes.

Turning credits into the money you actually spend

The credit number only becomes a cost when you know what you paid for the credits. Packs and subscriptions have different rates, and the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive is nearly four times.

Yearly plans reduce the per-credit rate further: $118.80 for 9,600 credits, $238.80 for 28,000, and $598.80 for 80,000. Read the credit cost guide and the live pricing page before you quote, because the rate you pay is the rate your margin is built on.

The formula I would use

job price = (final credits + test credits + revision credits)
            x your effective per-credit rate
            x markup

Three comments on the parts, all of them my opinion rather than a rule:

Test credits are part of the job, not a freebie. Every professional run should be preceded by a short sample. On a new client that sample is what you show them before the full render. Budget it.

Budget one full re-render as the revision allowance. A re-render costs the same credits as the first pass, because it is the same amount of processing. If you want to include two revisions, budget two.

The markup covers review, supervision and risk. The credit cost is what the machine charges you. It does not include watching the output frame by frame, comparing faces, checking edges, or the risk of a job that fails and has to be run again.

Worked example 1: a 30-second 1080p social edit

Suppose a client sends one 30-second clip for a 1080p clean-up.

• Final: 270 credits
• Test: 45 credits (five seconds, 1080p)
• One re-render: 270 credits
• Total: 585 credits

At the $29.99 / 1,500 pack, about two cents per credit, that is roughly $11.70 of processing. On the Creator subscription at $39 for 3,500 credits it is roughly $6.50.

A markup band of 2x to 4x on that figure gives $23 to $47 at pack rates, or $13 to $26 on the subscription. That band is my opinion, not a market survey. I am not telling you what freelancers charge. I am telling you what the number has to clear before the job is worth taking: your review time, your revision risk, and the fact that a client job carries a deadline.

Worked example 2: the same job quoted at 4K

Now run the identical source at 4K.

• Final: 990 credits
• Test: 165 credits (five seconds, 4K)
• One re-render: 990 credits
• Total: 2,145 credits

At pack rates that is roughly $43. At the Creator rate, roughly $24. The processing cost went up by 3.7 times for the same 30 seconds of client footage.

Here is where the money leaks. If you quote from the 1080p maths, say $23 to $47, and then deliver 4K because "4K sounds better", your cost is $43. On the $47 quote you keep about $4. On the $23 quote you lose $20 and did the work for free.

The fix is not to stop offering 4K. The fix is to quote the resolution you are actually going to run, and to say which one that is in writing.

Worked example 3: ten clips in one batch

A client sends ten 15-second product clips for 1080p.

• Final: 135 credits each, so 1,350
• One batch test: 45 credits
• One clip re-run: 135 credits
• Total: 1,530 credits

That is roughly $31 at the 1,500 pack rate and roughly $17 on the Creator subscription. The markup band puts the quote at $61 to $122 at pack rates. Batch work is where a monthly plan earns its keep, so compare the pack total against the Creator or Studio allowance before you quote.

Worked example 4: a three-minute 1080p job

Three minutes is 180 seconds, so 1,620 credits at 9 per second.

• Final: 1,620 credits
• Test: 45 credits
• One re-render: 1,620 credits
• Total: 3,285 credits

At the 1,500 pack rate that is about $66. At the 5,000 pack rate, about $53. On long-form work the pack decision is a pricing decision.

Revisions are re-renders

A client saying "can we try the other take" is not a small request. It is another full credit charge for the same duration. Thirty seconds at 1080p is 270 credits, roughly $5.40, every time.

Three ways to keep that from eating the job, in order of how well they work:

1. Put a number of revision passes in the quote, and state the price of each pass beyond that.
2. Show the five-second test before the full run, so the creative decision happens at 45 credits instead of 270.
3. If only part of the clip changed, re-run that segment as its own clip and splice it back. This does not always match perfectly at the cut, so watch the join.

Why quoting 4K for every job loses money

The 4K rate is 33 credits per second against 9 at 1080p. That is about 3.7 times the processing for the same footage. On a 60-second clip the difference is 1,440 credits, roughly $29 at pack rates, on a job that might have been quoted at $40.

Three things make this worse:

• The client often cannot see the difference. A social feed, a phone screen, and a compressed web player all throw away the extra pixels.
• The 4K run is not 3.7 times faster to review. It is the same review, at a larger file size, on a slower export.
• Quoting the higher cost to protect the margin pushes the price up, and the client compares it against every tool that advertises a free 4K button.

The defensible position is to quote 1080p or 2K by default, explain what the client actually gets, and offer 4K as a priced upgrade when the delivery justifies it: a TV screen, a paid master, or footage that will be cropped and reframed later.

A quote template you can copy

• Source: number of clips, total duration, and what you inspected.
• Target resolution and model, named.
• Included: one test run and one revision pass.
• Additional revision passes: priced per pass, at the credit cost of the full duration.
• Delivery format and file size.
• What is not included: recapture, colour grading, audio repair, and anything that needs a re-edit.

It works for one clip or a batch. The upscale calculator gives you the credit total before you write the number, and the video upscaler quotes the exact figure after it reads the real duration, which is the number to trust when a client's file is 4.2 seconds long.

Limitation

There is no market survey in this post. The markup bands are my judgment, offered so you can see the shape of the arithmetic, not so you can copy a price. I have not measured what clients will pay, and I have not compared against any competitor's service pricing.

On the cost side, the rates are published, and a test run confirms what a job consumes on your own account. I have not audited what happens to credits on a failed job, so do not build a quote that depends on any refund arriving on a given day. Price the job you can afford to run twice, and check the pricing page before the quote goes out.