Hiring someone to clip your podcast
Freelancer, in-house editor or agency, what a quote really covers, and the two things to settle in writing before you send anyone an episode.
Short answer
A freelancer suits low, irregular volume and a founder willing to direct the work. An in-house editor makes sense above roughly forty clips a month or where brand control and turnaround decide everything. An agency suits steady mid-volume output where you want a system rather than a person, and what you are really buying is that it keeps running when someone is unavailable. Price is the wrong comparison, because two quotes for the same clip count can cover very different amounts of work; the two questions that settle it are whether the vendor chooses the moments and whether the clips and project files become yours on payment.
Selection is the job. If a vendor's intake form has a required field for timestamps, you have hired an editor and kept the hard half for yourself, and you will feel it in month two when nobody has watched an episode end to end. That is the most useful question you can ask before signing anything, and it costs nothing to ask. The second is ownership, and it is worse than a disagreement: we read seventeen clipping-agency FAQ pages before writing this topic and three of them said anything at all about who owns the files. VALORAE Arc watches the episode and picks the moments itself, and the delivered clips and the project files behind them become the client's on payment of each invoice.