A brand that has been ordering video long enough always ends up asking the same question: would it not be cheaper to hire someone? It comes up at the wrong moment, which is right after an invoice that looked high, and it gets settled in the wrong place, which is by comparing a salary to a quote.
That is not the right comparison, and it does not depend on the quality of the work. It depends on one measurable thing: how regular the need is.
A regular need and an irregular need are not paid for the same way
A role is a fixed cost. It runs in January as in August, whether the brand has three campaigns or none. A service is a variable cost: it stops when demand stops.
As long as the need is irregular, the fixed cost loses mechanically, because it also pays for the empty months. As soon as the need becomes regular and predictable, the ratio flips, for the same reason turned around: the fixed cost spreads over a volume that no longer stops.
So the whole decision comes down to knowing which side of that tipping point your own need sits on. And that is a measurement, not an intuition: the last twelve months of orders give it in an hour.
What each option actually carries
Comparing a gross salary to a production quote means comparing two lines that do not cover the same things. The gap is not in the amount, it is in what each amount contains.
On the salaried side
The salary is only part of the cost. Add contributions, the paid leave during which production stops, equipment, software, the time spent recruiting, the time spent onboarding, and the continuing training of a craft whose formats change every six months.
Add one more thing nobody budgets: management time. A video role needs a brief, an arbitration and feedback, exactly like a contractor, except that this load lands on someone who already has a job.
On the contractor side
The quote covers the shoot, the edit and a defined number of revisions. It does not cover knowledge of the product, which has to be transmitted every time, nor immediate availability, nor being able to ask for one more version on a Friday evening.
It does cover a variety of faces, places and tones that a single role cannot produce, and that is often the deciding argument for paid advertising.
| Cost item | In house | On contract |
|---|---|---|
| Pay and contributions | fixed, all year | variable, per order |
| Equipment and software | borne by the brand | included in the price |
| Months with no need | paid anyway | not invoiced |
| Product knowledge | acquired once | retransmitted each time |
| Variety of faces and settings | limited to one person | wide by construction |
| Turnaround on an urgent request | short | depends on availability |
| Usage rights on the videos | acquired under the employment contract | negotiated per order |
By contrast with a price list, this reading names no winner: it only says that the two quotes do not describe the same service, and that both have to be brought back to the same scope before they can be compared.
The last row deserves a word, because it is usually discovered too late. What an employee produces within their duties falls under a different regime from what a contractor delivers: in the second case nothing accrues to the brand beyond what the assignment writes down in black and white, and a video ordered for an organic feed does not become usable in advertising because the invoice was paid. The role removes that negotiation; the contract puts it back on the table with every order, and that is a time cost as much as a money one. The subject has its own guide, assigning copyright in a UGC contract.
The calculation, with your variables rather than someone else's
Ready made thresholds circulate, of the "above so many videos a month, bring it in house" kind. They are wrong, and wrong by construction: the tipping point depends on the salary level you pay, on what your contractors charge, on how seasonal your activity is and on how much variety your campaigns demand. Two companies in the same sector tip at very different volumes.
The four inputs
- The real volume of the last twelve months, in videos delivered rather than campaigns run, and month by month so the troughs show.
- The full cost of a role as your company calculates it, contributions included, plus the equipment and software that are not already there.
- The average cost of a video on contract, revisions and usage rights included, not the entry price.
- The share of your videos that needs a different face or setting, because that is the share a single role will never cover.
What the result says, and what it does not
Dividing the full annual cost of the role by the average cost of a video gives a break-even volume. That number is useful and it is not an answer: it says how many videos would have to be produced for the role to pay for itself, at constant quality and ignoring seasonality.
It then has to be confronted with two realities. If your real volume is close to that number but concentrated in four months, the role will be saturated for a third of the year and idle the rest. And if a meaningful share of your videos needs different faces, it will stay on contract whatever happens, so it does not count toward the volume that justifies the role.
What in house does that nobody else will
Three things cannot be bought per order, and they sometimes weigh more than the arithmetic.
Reactivity on the unexpected, when a product goes out of stock or a competitor's campaign lands. Memory of the product, which saves re-explaining every time why a given claim is not made. And the ability to shoot a lot of cheap material to feed tests, where every externally commissioned test carries a unit price.
That is why the model that holds best, when volume allows, is neither one nor the other: a role covering the recurring and the reactive, and creators for whatever needs a new face.
The line not to cross
One temptation returns at every arbitration: keeping the contractor status while making the person work like an employee. Imposed hours, required presence, integration into the team, de facto exclusivity.
This is not a grey area, it is the very criterion that separates the two situations, and reclassification turns on the real conditions of work rather than on the label on the contract. The usual objection is that the creator prefers that flexibility: it changes nothing, because the risk does not sit with them.
In practice the rule is easy to hold. A contractor receives a result to deliver and a deadline, organises their own work, works for other clients, and invoices. As soon as one of those four stops being true, it is no longer a service contract, and that is the moment to hire properly.
Sources
Checked on 11 September 2026. This guide is not legal advice. Where this guide and the official source disagree, the source prevails.
