The editing tax: 338 hours a year.
If you publish one properly edited recording a week, post-production costs you about 338 hours a year — 8.5 working weeks — or $20,800 outsourced at mid-market rates. The number comes from timing all ten post-production tasks on a 12-minute recording: 6.5 hours each, 52 weeks. Full data: The Editing Tax.
By Marc Schultheiß — Founder of Never. Built the editing pipeline first — the frame-snapped splice, the acoustic cut refinement, the caption engine — then the company around it. · 2026-07-28
The number, derived in public
Three rows tell the story. One recording a week: 338 hours and $20,800 a year outsourced. Two a week: 676 and $41,600. Daily: 2,372 hours — a full-time editing job producing twelve minutes of you per day. The derivation, task by task, is in The Editing Tax methodology; nothing in it is exotic, which is the point. The tax is ordinary work, honestly counted.
Why this number changes decisions
Because it converts a vague dread into a line item. 'Editing takes forever' produces no decision; '8.5 working weeks a year' produces several — it's why an $800/month editor can be rational, why consistency collapses in busy quarters (the tax comes due weekly, revenue work outbids it), and why the backlog folder exists: each unedited file is 6.5 unpaid hours, and the packaging half — captions, reframes, thumbnails, uploads — is the half that makes skipping feel rational. Whatever tool or person you throw at it, aim at the biggest line items first.
Read the transcript
The editing tax: 338 hours a year. If you publish one properly edited recording a week, post-production costs you about 338 hours a year — 8.5 working weeks — or $20,800 outsourced at mid-market rates. The number comes from timing all ten post-production tasks on a 12-minute recording: 6.5 hours each, 52 weeks. Full data: The Editing Tax.
Frequently asked questions
Is the 338-hour number cherry-picked?
It's multiplication you can check: 6.5 measured hours × 52 weeks. The task-level timing, assumptions and limitations are published in the methodology. If your own timing comes out lower, your tax is lower — most people who measure find they'd been under-counting the packaging half.
Does batching recordings reduce the tax?
It reduces context-switching, not the tax itself — every recording still needs its own selects, cuts, captions, clips and uploads. Batching moves the 6.5 hours; automation is what removes most of them.
What's the cheapest way out?
Depends which currency you're spending. Cash-cheapest: do it yourself and pay in weeks. Time-cheapest: outsource at ~$400/recording, ~$20,800/year. The third option — automating the packaging majority — is why this number is on this site; run your own cadence through the maths before believing anyone's pitch, ours included.