How to Quote a Videography Job That Wins the Booking

What a videography quote needs to include

A videography quote is a small contract-in-waiting — get the details right and there's nothing to argue about once the footage is in the edit. Nine things, every time:

1. 1Your business details — name, logo, contact details, and VAT number if registered.
2. 2The client's name and the shoot details — date, location(s), and the brief in one line.
3. 3A quote number and date.
4. 4Itemised line items — filming time, additional crew or kit, editing, deliverables — never one lump sum for “video work”.
5. 5What's not included — extra locations, rush turnaround, physical media, travel beyond an agreed radius.
6. 6Usage and licensing terms — private/social use only, or paid advertising and broadcast use, and whether it's exclusive.
7. 7How many rounds of revisions are included — and what happens, and what it costs, beyond that.
8. 8Subtotal, VAT (if applicable), and the total.
9. 9A valid-until date and payment terms — deposit to secure the date, balance on delivery, one clear next step.

Most quotes that lose bookings — or win them and quietly become unprofitable — are missing the licensing line and the revision-round cap. That's exactly where disputes start once the first cut lands in the client's inbox.

How to price a video job before you send a number

The document is the easy half. Pricing is where a job stays profitable — or quietly stops being worth doing.

Break the job into what actually costs you time

List every stage separately: pre-production, the filming day, any second camera or drone add-on, backing up and logging footage, editing and grading, revisions, and final delivery. Itemised quotes get accepted more readily, and let a client trim a line instead of walking away from the whole quote.

Three things videographers routinely forget to charge for

• Editing and revision hours beyond the first cut — a polished finished minute can easily take four to six hours of editing, and further revision rounds should be billed separately once the included cap is used.
• Music and licensed footage — a commercial-use track or licensed stock/drone footage is a real cost, not a rounding error.
• Kit, insurance and backup — camera bodies, gimbals, a licensed drone operator and redundant off-site storage are all running costs worth spreading across your pricing.

Then add 15–20% margin on top of your costs to cover the quiet weeks, admin time, and the business itself, not just the day you're filming.

A worked example

Here's a half-day corporate brand film, quoted the right way:

Includes a licence for the client's own website, social channels and internal use. Excludes paid advertising or broadcast placement — available on request. Further revision rounds beyond the two included are billed at £75/hour. Quote valid for 21 days. 30% deposit to secure the date, balance on delivery. To accept, reply to this email or tap Accept on the quote.

Clear, itemised, and the licensing and revisions lines mean nobody's surprised later if the client wants to run a cutdown as a paid ad or asks for a fourth round of tweaks.

Five details that get videography quotes accepted faster

• Send it within 24 hours. Clients comparing videographers are often comparing two or three at once — a fast, professional quote reads as the reliable choice.
• Name the deliverables precisely. “1× 90-second film, 3× 15-second vertical cutdowns, delivered within 10 working days” beats “a video” every time.
• State the revision rounds up front. “Two rounds of revisions included” is a specific, fair line that heads off the single most common video dispute before it starts.
• Make it look like a document, not a WhatsApp message. A branded PDF with your logo and a link to your showreel justifies the price far better than a number typed into a chat thread.
• Follow up once, professionally. A short “happy to talk through the treatment or answer any questions on the quote” a few days later recovers jobs that got buried in someone else's inbox.

The fastest way to do all of this

Building the document above from scratch — line items, licensing wording, VAT, a valid-until date — takes 30–45 minutes in a Word template each time. Fine for the odd enquiry; a real cost once you're quoting several shoots a week around actual filming and editing.

This is exactly why QuoteRocket exists. You describe the job in plain English — "half-day corporate shoot, drone add-on, 90-second film plus three social cutdowns, two rounds of revisions" — and it turns that into a branded, itemised PDF quote in under a minute: line items, prices you can adjust, VAT, valid-until date, the lot. Your client accepts it with one tap on their phone, and an accepted quote becomes an invoice in one click. It's free to try, and while it started life quoting landscaping and trade jobs, photographers and videographers have been some of the quickest to adopt it since.

Whatever tool you use to produce it, the principles hold: itemise everything, price your editing time honestly, be explicit about usage rights and revision rounds, and make saying yes effortless.

Frequently asked questions

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