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About this tool
True cost of one video or post: your hours at an hourly rate plus gear depreciation, software, overheads and direct cash spend.
Cost per content is everything one video or post consumes, not just what you spent on the day: hours multiplied by your hourly rate, plus straight-line gear depreciation, software, overheads and direct cash, with each recurring cost divided by the pieces you publish that month. The result includes cost per finished minute, margin against expected revenue, and what you actually earn per working hour once cash costs are taken out. Built for creators and small studios pricing sponsorships or deciding whether a format is worth continuing.
Open Cost Per Content Calculator on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Enter the values you already know.
Fine-tune the options to match your scenario.
Read the result and use it in your planning or reporting.
Unpaid hours are the largest line for most creators and the one usually left out.
Gear, software and overheads are divided by the month's output, not charged in full to one piece.
Revenue minus cash costs, divided by hours worked — the number that tells you if the format is worth it.
Add the cost of your hours (hours x hourly rate), the share of gear depreciation for that month, the share of software and overhead subscriptions, and any cash spent on that shoot. Nineteen hours at 800 an hour is 15,200 before a single rupee of cash leaves your account.
Straight-line depreciation is the simplest approach: divide the purchase price by the useful life in months. A 300,000 kit over 36 months is 8,333 a month, which becomes about 2,083 per video if you publish four a month. Your accountant may use a different rate for tax, so keep the two separate.
Only your hours and direct spend scale with each piece. Gear depreciation, software and overheads are fixed monthly amounts, so publishing eight pieces instead of four halves the fixed cost carried by each one.
Use what a client would pay you for that hour, or what you would earn doing your next-best paid work. If you have no benchmark, take your target annual income, divide by 12, then by the hours you can realistically bill in a month.
Add the Cost Per Content Calculatorwidget to your blog or website — free, responsive, no signup. Just keep the “Widget by AltFTool” credit link visible.
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