What a commercial actually costs — and what we removed to get under $5
The Optiq Studio Team
Producing a traditional broadcast-grade commercial costs between $3,000 and $20,000. That figure is not padding. It is camera crews, lighting rigs, actors, a sound engineer, a location, and an editor who bills by the day.
Six decisions and a lot of logistics
Strip a commercial down and you are paying for six things: how the story is paced, how the set looks, who is in it, how it sounds, how the camera moves, and how it is cut together. Everything else on the invoice is the cost of getting human beings into a room to make those six decisions.
Optiq Studio removes the logistics and keeps the decisions. Five specialist agents each own one of them, which is why the output holds together instead of looking like a prompt-generated slideshow.
What we did not remove
- Sound design. It is the fastest way to tell a cheap ad from a good one, so it gets its own agent.
- Character consistency. A face that changes between shots reads as fake instantly.
- Camera discipline. Real optical behaviour, not arbitrary drift.
Who this changes things for
A bakery that can finally show the bread coming out of the oven instead of describing it. A tailor whose work photographs badly but films beautifully. A mechanic whose entire competitive advantage is trust, which is very hard to convey in a static post.