The same minute of video costs $0.41 or $500
Video localisation has the widest price spread I have found in a single service. Same deliverable, three orders of magnitude apart, all available today.
Take one minute of finished video and ask for it in another language. Depending on who you ask, here is what you are quoted.
| Who | Turnaround | Per minute |
|---|---|---|
| Traditional agency | 2–6 weeks | $20–500 |
| Professional dubbing | Studio schedule | $20–40 |
| Freelancer | Variable | $5–15 |
| Subtitling service | Days | $2–15 |
| AI platform | Same day | $0.41–20 |
Figures read from published rate cards and industry comparisons, September 2026. Ranges are wide because quality tiers inside each category vary enormously.
A spread this wide means something
In a settled market, the price of a commodity service converges. Buyers learn what it should cost, sellers who charge far above that lose work, and the range narrows to maybe two or three times from cheapest to dearest.
A range of more than a thousand times says the opposite. It says buyers cannot yet tell these options apart — and that some of them are paying agency rates for something a platform now does the same afternoon.
A gap this wide means the market has not finished repricing. It will. The interesting question is what is left standing when it does.
Growing while it reprices
Two figures from published industry forecasts:
| Segment | 2026 → 2035 | CAGR |
|---|---|---|
| Video localisation | $4.02B → $7.47B | 7.2% |
| Subtitle translation | $3.8B → $10.04B | 11.4% |
From published market research reports. Treat any nine-year projection as a direction, not a number.
So demand is rising while unit cost collapses. Those two facts together usually mean volume explodes — work that was never worth localising at $50 a minute becomes obviously worth localising at $2.
What I think this actually means
The naive reading is that AI eats the localisation agencies. I do not think that is quite it.
What collapses is the price of the capability. Translating and dubbing a minute of video is becoming close to free. What does not collapse is everything around it: deciding which of your 400 videos are worth localising, into which languages, checking the result is not embarrassing in a market you do not speak, and getting it published on the right channels in the right formats.
That is the same shape I keep running into everywhere in this research. The capability commoditises. The coordination does not.
Related
The same pattern, one category over.
Every tool sold to video agencies stops at $75 a month — where the same commoditisation shows up in editing software, and what it leaves untouched.