How much does a company video cost in Italy (and why nobody publishes a price list)

On September 8, 2026, ProntoPro's page for videographers in Milan showed a request to film a couple in the CityLife area, with a budget listed between €150 and €500. A few lines down there was one from April: a memorial video for someone, made of photographs and background music, between €100 and €200. Above both sat the average price range the site calculates for the category: €30 to €1,200.

People who search “how much does a company video cost” often land on pages like this one and leave with a number that means nothing. The site isn't the problem. The problem is that the word “video” covers jobs that have nothing in common.

Is there an average price for a company video?

No, and distrusting anyone who gives you one without asking questions is already a good rule. Italy has no official price list or industry rate card for company videos. The figures that circulate online come from platforms that collect every kind of request, or from companies that sell do-it-yourself video tools and have an interest in showing how much the alternative costs.

Meanwhile the market is growing. According to the Internet Media Observatory of the Politecnico di Milano, online advertising in Italy should reach about €7 billion in 2026, with video formats accounting for 41%. The more companies ask for video, the wider the range of quotes: from the young freelancer with a single camera to the production company with thirty people on set.

The serious way to answer the question is to break the price down into its parts.

What does the price of a company video depend on?

The items are almost always the same. What changes is how much each one weighs.

Preparation. Writing what the video will say, choosing the locations, deciding the shots, organizing the day. It is the part the client sees least and the one that decides the most: a shooting day without preparation costs the same and brings home half as much.

Shooting days. The bill is calculated by the day, and each day is multiplied by the people on site: whoever films, whoever handles the lighting, whoever records the sound, whoever coordinates. A company video shot in a warehouse by one person costs a fraction of one shot at three locations with a team of five.

The people in front of the camera. An employee talking about their own work usually isn't paid separately. An actor is. As a rough guide, the national contract for film and audiovisual actors, in force since March 1, 2024, sets a minimum of €325 per shooting day and €1,100 for a lead. It isn't necessarily the contract that applies to a commercial, but it gives a sense of how much a professional face weighs.

Editing and graphics. Cutting, color correction, subtitles, animated text. Here the price grows with the number of versions: a horizontal video for the website, a vertical one for social media and a 15-second cut for advertising are three jobs, even if the footage is the same.

Rights. Music, stock footage, faces: each comes with a license that says where and for how long the video can be used. It is the item most often missing from low quotes.

What hidden costs are there in a video quote?

The ones that surface later, when the video is already finished and someone wants to use it in a way nobody planned for.

Music is the most common example. Music libraries sell different subscriptions depending on use: on Epidemic Sound, for instance, only the Pro and Enterprise plans cover advertising campaigns. So if the video ends up in a paid social ad, the right subscription is one of those two. The same reasoning applies to an actor paid for the website who then appears in a TV commercial.

Then there is the drone. Aerial footage has become an almost automatic request, but the pilot must hold the ENAC certificates suited to the type of flight. One of them, the A2 certificate, is obtained after the basic A1/A3 certificate, practical training and an exam with a fixed fee of €31. In a quote it is worth asking who will fly and with which certificate: if the “drone” line costs much less than the others, that is often where something is missing.

Finally, revisions. “Two rounds of changes included” and “unlimited changes” are two different prices, even if the number at the bottom is the same.

Does artificial intelligence bring the price down?

It brings down the price of images. With the standard version of Veo 3.1, Google's video generation model, one second of high-definition video with audio costs $0.40 at list price, or $24 per minute. The Lite version drops to $0.08 per second, under $5 per minute.

Our reading at Project Mantra is that this moves the value rather than wiping it out. When producing images costs almost nothing, anyone can fill a minute with beautiful shots, and in fact many company videos are starting to look alike: the drone over the plant, hands at work in slow motion, the voice talking about passion and quality. What stays expensive is deciding what to show so that customers understand something no competitor has ever made them understand.

It is the same problem we describe in the guide to Category Design: if a company presents itself with the words and images of its whole industry, customers compare it with the others on price. A video your nearest competitor could sign, whatever it costs, is a video that reinforces the wrong category.

How do you compare two quotes for a company video?

By sending everyone the same written brief, and asking for the price broken down by item. A useful brief says at least what the video needs to achieve, where it will be used (website, social media, trade shows, advertising, television), for how long, in how many formats and who appears in it.

With the items separated, quotes become readable. If one costs half as much as the other, you can usually see where right away: one shooting day fewer, nobody on sound, music not licensed for advertising, a single version instead of three. Sometimes the cut is fine, sometimes it isn't, but it is a choice made knowing what you are giving up.

The last question to ask is who wrote what the video will say. In many quotes that line isn't there, or it is a one-hour meeting. At Google's list price, $24 pays for one minute of high-definition images. None of those 24 dollars pays for the decision about what to put in them.