How an Arc campaign is scoped, and why there is no price list

VALORAE Arc has no price list.

I read the best argument I have seen for printing one, and Arc still does not have one.

Every Arc campaign is scoped on a call, and the number comes out of the footage and where the clips are going.

This post covers what goes into that scope, why the number stays on the call, what to ask when you get there, and the paper that nearly changed my mind.

Play 1: What goes into the scope

Five things decide the size of a campaign.

How much footage there is. A single episode and a full back catalogue are different jobs.

How many clips you want out of it.

Which platforms the clips are for. A clip cut for one feed is a different file from a clip reformatted for every platform.

Whether you want the clips posted for you, or handed over as files for your own team to post.

What reporting you want back, and how often.

None of those five can be read off a form. They come out of a conversation with someone who has watched the footage.

Play 2: Why a rate card would mislead

The case against a rate card is simple.

A monthly clip count can describe a trimmed excerpt with auto captions, or a selected, re-hooked, hand-captioned piece reformatted for every platform. Both sellers are telling the truth, at very different prices.

A card with one number per clip hides that difference, and the buyer finds it after paying.

So Arc prints receipts instead: 500+ videos delivered, 10M+ views generated, 65%+ retention, 1000+ posts uploaded.

Those are ours and you can check the work. The clips are on youtube.com/@ValoraeArc and the running log is on x.com/VALORAEARC.

The receipts answer "are these people real". They say nothing to "what does this cost".

I know that gap is there. The next section is the strongest reason I have seen to close it.

Play 3: The study that argued for a number

The paper is arXiv 2605.25517, "What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines", by Vishwakarma, Kumar and Jamidar at Sprinklr, presented at SIGIR 2026.

The setup is clean. Two near-identical pages go into a model's context, one detail differs, and the paper records which page gets the first citation.

Per arXiv 2605.25517, the authors ran 252,000 paired trials across six models, flipping one factor per pair.

Table 2 of the arXiv version lists "Price vs No Price" at odds ratios of 7.82, 6.26, 36.1 and 30.4 on four of the models, and above 10,000 on the other two.

So the lowest odds ratio in Table 2 of arXiv 2605.25517 is about six.

On the model least moved by a price, the page with a number still won the first citation at six times the odds, per the SIGIR 2026 study.

The paper's conclusion also groups "Price Not Mentioned" with three other gatekeepers: topic match, recency and list position. Fail any one and the rest of the page barely matters.

It even flags "Contact us for pricing details" as a detected issue in its worked example.

By that standard, the Arc site trips a gatekeeper. I read the table twice before deciding to keep it that way.

Play 4: Why Arc still keeps the number to the call

The paper measures citation odds in a two-document sandbox. It does not measure clicks on a live site or campaigns that get signed, and it says so in its own limitations section.

So I cannot tell you how much traffic a missing price costs Arc. Nobody can.

What I can tell you is what a printed price would have to be.

It would be a full card, which brings back the problem in Play 2.

Or it would be a single starting figure, which a buyer quotes back before anyone has seen the footage, and which then has to move once the five things in Play 1 are known.

For work that changes with every show, I did not think either was honest.

So Arc takes the lower citation odds and keeps the number on the call, where it can be set against the real footage.

Google is the other half. Its page on creating helpful content asks for first-hand expertise and clear sourcing, and says nothing about a price.

Two engines, two rulebooks. Arc chose which one to fail, on purpose, and the receipts are how the page tries to earn its place anyway.

Play 5: The one money figure on the page

There is one number about money on Arc, and it is a receipt: Arc has done $10K+ in revenue.

That number is small on purpose. It is true, it is ours, and it tells a buyer that campaigns were scoped and paid for.

It tells you nothing about what your campaign will cost, and it is not meant to.

The long version of the cost argument, with other people's ranges named so you can check them, is in what podcast clipping costs.

Another company in the group made the opposite call. VALORAE Media lists Full Page at $2,000 to $3,500 a month, on its pricing post and on the site.

Its Edit and Manage tiers are quoted on the call, for the same reason Arc quotes everything: the work varies with what arrives.

Both sit under the same founder, Siddharth Khushalani, and both feed the same answer engines.

That gives me something to watch. If the study holds, Media's pricing post should be cited on cost queries more often than anything Arc publishes. Whichever way it goes, I will write it up.

Play 6: What to ask on the call

A call with no price list only works if the buyer walks in with questions.

These are the ones I would bring.

• What counts as one clip in this scope?
• Which platforms is each clip cut for?
• Are the clips posted for me, or delivered as files?
• What reporting do I get back, and how often?
• What happens to the number if I send more footage than we scoped?
• Can I see clips from a show like mine?

Write the answers down next to the number. If the number and the answers do not match, ask again before you agree to anything.

Play 7: Where to start

If you want a number for your show, send one episode through valoraearc.com.

The campaign gets scoped on a call against that footage, and the number follows from the scope.

The short version

• Arc has no public price list, by choice.
• The scope comes from five things: footage, clip count, platforms, posted or delivered as files, and reporting.
• A rate card would hide the gap between a trimmed excerpt and a finished clip.
• The SIGIR 2026 study at arXiv 2605.25517 puts the citation lift from an explicit price at six or more. Arc weighed that and declined.
• The one money figure Arc prints is a receipt: $10K+ in revenue.
• Bring the call questions, and write the answers next to the number.

Every Arc campaign is scoped on a call against your footage, at valoraearc.com.