Descript pricing plans — and what one finished short actually costs

Descript prices by media hours and AI credits per month, not by the finished video, which makes the real cost hard to size up front. This page lists every tier, including the free one, as checked against Descript's own pricing page, and lines up ReelsCut's flat per-video price next to them: $5 for one video, or $19, $29 and $69 for 15, 30 and 100 videos a month.

Every Descript plan, checked against the pricing page

Checked on 2026-09-17, straight from Descript's own pricing page. All five tiers, including the free one most comparisons skip, with the unit that actually caps your month: media hours (the length of audio or video you process inside Descript, regardless of how short the finished cut ends up) and AI credits (spent on AI features like removing filler words, Studio Sound and captions). For the category decision behind these numbers — a transcript editor versus a finished-file service — see the Descript alternative breakdown.

What the export and watermark line actually changes

Free's export tops out at 720p with a watermark on every file, which is enough to judge the editing but not to publish. Hobbyist removes the watermark and lifts resolution to 1080p — the first tier where a finished file is actually usable on its own. Creator and Business both export at 4K; the difference between those two tiers is seats and storage, not video quality.

Seats and storage scale the same way: one person on Hobbyist, up to three sharing Creator, up to five on Business, each tier's cloud storage growing from 100GB to 1TB to 2TB to hold more raw footage across more editors. A single editor working through occasional projects doesn't need Business's seats or 2TB; that gap is what makes Creator or Hobbyist the actual comparison for a solo talking-head channel, not the top tier.

Which Descript tier fits which kind of user

Podcaster editing one or two episodes a week: the raw recording time is what counts against media hours, not the published runtime, so a couple of hours of raw audio a week fits inside Hobbyist's 10 hours. Add video export or go weekly with longer sessions and Creator's 30 hours plus 4K stops the allowance from being the thing you watch instead of your show.

Social or shorts creator cutting many short takes: the AI-credit meter runs alongside the hour meter here, and repeated use of filler-word removal, captions and clip-making on every take draws down credits fastest. Creator's 800 credits gives more room than Hobbyist's 400 before the credit cap arrives ahead of the hour cap.

Agency or small team handling client work: Business is built for this — up to 5 seats sharing one plan, 2TB of storage for multiple clients' raw footage, and 40 hours plus 1,500 credits to split across editors. Anything past that moves to a custom Enterprise quote.

One-off or occasional user with a single project: Free covers trying the tool, but its output is capped at 720p with a watermark and a one-time 100 AI credits, not a monthly allowance — publishing a clean, unwatermarked file means paying the $24 Hobbyist entry price even for a single video. That is the gap a flat $5 one-off video fills without a plan at all.

The hidden cost: media hours, not videos, cap your month

Descript's plan pages advertise media hours and AI credits, not a number of finished videos, so the real capacity of a tier depends entirely on how long your raw footage runs before you trim it — a number Descript's pricing page doesn't publish or guarantee.

As a worked example (not a Descript figure): say a raw talking-head take runs 20 minutes before the retakes and false starts are cut out. At 20 minutes of media processed per short, Free's 60 minutes covers about 3 raw takes before the one-time AI credits or the monthly hour reset become the limit; Hobbyist's 600 minutes covers roughly 30; Creator's 1,800 minutes covers roughly 90; Business's 2,400 minutes covers roughly 120. Double the raw take length to 40 minutes and every one of those counts is cut in half — the plan's advertised hour figure stays fixed, but the number of videos it buys moves with your footage, not with Descript's marketing page.

AI credits can run out before media hours do: how many credits a single edit action consumes isn't published as a fixed number on the pricing page, so a month heavy on Studio Sound, filler-word removal and caption generation can hit Hobbyist's 400-credit cap before the 10-hour media cap, even on short raw takes. Descript's page doesn't convert either allowance into a per-video count, which is exactly the gap a flat per-video price closes.

How much does Descript cost per video

The formula for ReelsCut is simple: plan price divided by videos included. Descript's formula isn't, because its allowance is media hours and AI credits, not videos — how many shorts that covers depends on how long your raw footage runs before you trim it, and Descript's pricing page doesn't convert that into a per-video number. The table below shows ReelsCut's per-video cost worked out, and names that Descript gap explicitly rather than guessing at it.

Where Descript's pricing is genuinely fair

A flat monthly fee is predictable if you're editing most days: you're not thinking about per-video cost at all once you've picked a tier. Annual billing knocks off close to a third of the monthly price on Hobbyist (33%), a bit less on Creator (31%) and Business (23%), and Creator and up bundle team seats rather than charging per seat separately.

If your editing volume is steady and you're comfortable estimating your own media-hour usage, Descript's ladder is a reasonable, published deal — it just isn't priced the way a per-video decision wants it to be.

ReelsCut's difference: priced per video, not per hour of media

ReelsCut takes one vertical 9:16 talking-head recording with the retakes, false starts, filler words and pauses left in, and returns a finished short — the price is per video, known before you upload, and there's no monthly allowance to track.

The fear behind a subscription decision is usually "what if I pay and it comes out wrong": before you pay anything, you get a full watermarked preview of the finished video, not a short clip — one free trial order per account is the whole video, not a teaser, so you're judging the actual cut and captions before money changes hands. If it isn't right, ask for changes in plain English: you have up to 2 revision rounds before payment and up to 10 more after the clean file is unlocked.

There's no media-hour meter or AI-credit balance to watch: one upload is one video, at a known price ($5 one-off, or $19, $29 and $69 for the 15-, 30- and 100-video plans), and running out of an allowance mid-month isn't a way this can fail.

Try it before you commit to either

Upload one raw take now and see the actual finished short before deciding anything about a monthly plan on either side. There's no subscription to start or cancel to get the preview.

Descript is a trademark of its owner. ReelsCut is not affiliated with Descript.