Your First Explainer Video: A Checklist for Small Budgets

James Crawford

Published September 17, 202610 min readUpdated September 17, 2026

Your website gets visitors who don't understand what you do in five seconds. A short video fixes that, and you already know it. Then you go shopping, and you find price lists that jump from a few dollars to five figures, with nobody telling you what to settle first.

An explainer video is a short video that says what you do, who it's for, and what to do next. Your first explainer video is not a shopping problem, though. It's a decision problem.

Make the small decisions in the right order and the cheap option works fine. Make them out of order and you pay for the same video twice.

Here is the checklist: what to decide, what to have ready, what to sign off, and what to measure.

Get your first explainer video made cheaply by settling the decisions before you shop. Pick one job for the video, one action for the viewer, and a length of 30 or 60 seconds. Gather your logo, colours, photos and phone number. Then approve the script in writing before anyone animates a frame.

What should you decide before you spend a dollar?

Seven decisions stand between you and a finished video, and each one has a cheap default you can take in under a minute. Spend your thinking on the first two, the job of the video and the action you want, then take the defaults for the rest.

Price is the last decision, not the first. A custom 60-second animated explainer from a North American studio usually costs $5,000 to $10,000, and 3D or character work costs more, according to Vidico's 2026 explainer video cost guide. A 2026 survey of 45 agencies found an average price of £2,960 (Squideo).

Those figures buy a lot of choices you have not made yet. Make the choices yourself and a fixed-price package covers the same ground.

Decision	Your options	The cheap default
The one job	Explain the service, show your process, answer one objection	Explain the service in plain words
Length	30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 seconds	30 seconds
Style	Whiteboard animation, 2D motion graphics, live action	2D motion graphics
Voice	Real human voiceover, synthetic voice, your own voice	A real human voiceover included in the price
Who makes it	DIY tool, freelancer, studio, fixed-price package	A fixed-price package (our 30-second explainer is $297, normally $497)
First home	Homepage, one service page, Google Business Profile, ads	The page you already send people to
Your number	Phone calls, form fills, online bookings	Phone calls, counted for 30 days

Copy that table into a note and fill in the right-hand column. That note is your brief, and a brief is the cheapest thing you will ever write.

Need an explainer video? Get a 30-second explainer for $297 → We write the script, record the voiceover and animate it, delivered in 7 days.

How do you plan your first explainer video, step by step?

Eight steps take you from idea to finished video: one job, one action, your files, the length, the script sign-off, the style, the page it lives on, and the number you will check. Take them in that order, because the order is the part that saves money.

Most steps you skip come back later as a revision round.

Step 1: Pick the one job the video has to do

Give the video one job, written in one sentence: "This video explains what we do to someone who has never heard of us." A video that covers your whole business covers nothing clearly.

Step 2: Write down the one action you want

Decide now what a viewer should do at the end: call you, book online, or fill in the form. Write that action down and keep it out of the middle of the script.

Step 3: Gather what the maker needs from you

Put your logo file, brand colours, photos, website address and phone number in one folder before you order anything. Most first videos run late because the owner is hunting for a logo, not because the maker is slow.

Step 4: Choose 30 seconds or 60 seconds

Pick 30 to 45 seconds for ads and social feeds, and 60 to 90 seconds for your website and sales pages, according to Yum Yum Videos' 2026 guide to explainer video length. Length sets your script: about 150 spoken words fit in a minute, so 60 seconds is roughly 140 to 160 words (Breadnbeyond).

Step 5: Approve the script before anyone animates

Read the script out loud, time it on your phone, and approve it in writing. A simple script has four parts: hook, problem, solution and call to action (Biteable's script template). Words are free to change. Animated frames are not.

Step 6: Pick a style you can afford twice

Choose the style you would happily pay for again next year, because a second video in the same style looks like a set. Whiteboard animation is the budget-friendly choice for step-by-step teaching and professional services, 2D motion graphics is the all-round style, and live action needs a real face or product on camera, according to Pexo's 2026 guide to explainer video types.

Step 7: Decide where the video will live

Name the exact page your video goes on before you order it, not after. Our guide to where to put an explainer video on your site walks through the page-by-page choices.

Step 8: Set the number you will check for 30 days

Write down today's number for the one thing you want more of: calls, form fills or bookings. Without a before number, you will never know what the video did.

What do you need to have ready before you order?

Your first explainer video needs six things from you, and all six fit in one folder on your desktop. Put them together before you pay anyone, because every missing item adds a day to delivery.

Your logo as a PNG or SVG file, not a screenshot lifted off your own website.
Your two brand colours, as hex codes if you have them (a hex code is the colour number that starts with #).
Five to ten photos of your real work, team, van or reception.
Your website address, typed exactly as you want it shown on screen.
The phone number someone answers, written the way it should be read out (for example, 555-0142).
One line that says what you do and who you do it for.

Miss the logo file and you get a fuzzy logo pulled off your site. Miss the colours and your video looks like someone else's business.

Miss the photos and a service business ends up showing stock footage of an office nobody recognises. Customers who have been to your shop notice that straight away.

The one-line description is the item most owners skip, and it is the one the script gets built on. Write it the way you would answer a neighbour who asked what you do.

Which first-timer mistakes cost the most money?

Four mistakes cost first-time buyers real money, and all four are avoidable in the week before you order. Three of them burn a revision round. A revision round is one batch of changes you send back at once.

Animating before the script is signed off is the expensive one. Once a scene is drawn and voiced, a small wording change means redrawing and rerecording, so your free revisions get spent on fixes you could have typed in a document for nothing.

Cramming three services into 30 seconds is the second mistake. A plumber who sells emergency call-outs, boiler installs and bathroom fits needs three videos, or one video about one thing. Make the first one about whichever job pays the bills this month.

Leaving out a clear closing ask is the third. A common script split gives the action about 10% of the words, with 30% on the problem, 40% on the solution and 20% on proof, according to Content Beta's 60-second script guide. That last line has room for one instruction and a phone number, so choose both now.

Not asking what happens if you dislike the first draft is the fourth, and it can cost you the whole video. Ask three things in writing before you pay: how many revision rounds are included, what counts as one round, and what the refund terms are. We include 3 revision rounds and a money-back guarantee, and any maker should answer those three questions without hedging.

What can you skip on a first video?

Skip anything that raises the price without helping a stranger understand your business faster. On a first video that means custom drawn characters, 3D animation and custom music.

None of those three make a boiler service or a teeth-cleaning visit clearer. A template-based style with your own logo and colours reads as yours to everyone except a designer.

Skip extra languages until one video works in one language. Skip the 90-second version until the 30-second version runs out of things to say.

Skip the second video until you have read your 30-day number. If you do want a bigger production later, our comparison of what different explainer video companies charge lays out what the extra money buys.

Want something bigger? Book a free 30-minute video call → We plan your custom video with you and send a fixed quote within 24 hours.

What does the checklist look like for a plumber, a dentist and a gym?

A plumber, a dentist and a gym owner work through the same checklist and get three different answers, because the one job changes with the trade. Here is how the first four decisions land for each of them.

A plumber picks emergency call-outs as the one job and "call this number now" as the action. Thirty seconds is plenty, and 2D motion graphics wins because a burst pipe is easier to draw than to film. The number stays on screen for the last four seconds.

A dentist picks one treatment, often the nervous-patient visit, and "book online" as the action. Sixty seconds suits a website page where people read before they call, and a calm, simple style beats anything busy.

A gym owner picks the first week as the one job and "claim your free trial" as the action. Live action earns its place here, because a real room with real members is the product.

How do you tell if the video paid for itself in 30 days?

Write down one number before the video goes live, then read the same number 30 days later. Count calls, form fills or bookings from the page the video sits on, and compare the total with the 30 days before.

Do not assume a lift. Results in 2026 run from a 10% drop, when the wrong video sits on the wrong page, up to a 100% lift when the right video sits in the right place, according to Foundry CRO's 2026 landing-page video benchmarks. The 80% figure people still quote comes from pre-2020 data.

The odds are decent, though. 82% of video marketers reported a positive return on video in Wyzowl's 2026 State of Video Marketing survey (Levitate Media).

If the number moves, order the second video. If it does not, change the page or the closing ask before you change the video. Our break-even maths for an explainer video shows how few extra jobs it takes to cover a fixed-price video.

Frequently asked questions

Can I use one video for my website and my Facebook ads?

Often yes, as long as the video is 30 seconds and the closing ask works in both places. Ads favour 30 to 45 seconds, while website pages carry 60 to 90 seconds comfortably. Ask your video maker for a square or vertical crop at the same time as the wide version.

Do I have to write the script myself?

No. Most fixed-price packages include the script, written from your one-line description and the action you picked. Your job is to read it out loud, time it, and approve it before animation starts.

How many revision rounds should a first-time buyer expect?

Two or three rounds is normal for a fixed-price video, and a round should mean a batch of changes, not a single word. Get the number in writing before you pay, plus what happens once those rounds are used. We include 3 revision rounds.

Is it worth making a video if I only get a few visitors a month?

Maybe not yet, if the video only lives on a quiet page. A video earns faster when it also sits in your Google Business Profile, your email signature and your ads. Fix the traffic and the video together, or spend on traffic first.

The short version

A first explainer video usually goes wrong for one reason: the decisions get made in the wrong order, by whoever happens to be holding the file. So make them yourself, on paper, in an afternoon. One job. One action. One length. One style. One page it lives on. One number you will check in 30 days.

Then put your logo, colours, photos, website address and phone number in a folder, and read the script out loud before a single frame gets animated. That is the whole checklist, and writing it costs nothing.

Do that and the cheap route stops being a compromise. You get a video that says one thing clearly, asks for one action, and hands you a number to judge it by.

Ready to get your own video made? Order a 30-second explainer for $297 and have it in 7 days, or book a free call if you want a custom video from $1,299.

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