What a ten-language dub costs in credits
One source video into ten markets, broken into line items. Dub jobs are flat per language; the chargeable events concentrate in captions and exports.
The most expensive mistake in localisation budgeting is reaching for the wrong rate card. Someone prices a ten-market rollout by taking the lipsync rate, which bills per second of finished clip, multiplying it by a three-minute runtime, then multiplying that by ten. The number that falls out is enormous, the project gets cut to two markets, and the whole thing was arithmetic on a meter that does not apply.
Dubbing is not a per-second render. It is submitted as a job and billed as a job.
Dubbing is flat per job, and the language is not a price input
A dub is one flat charge per submitted target language. Ten languages is ten jobs, and the tenth costs exactly what the first did.
Nothing in the pricing reads the target language. There is no rare-language surcharge, no multiplier for a smaller market, no discount for a common one. Japanese and Spanish charge the same. Nor does the number of speakers in the source move it, and nor does the fact that dubbing sits near lipsync in the product — a dub is its own job type with its own flat charge, not a per-second face render. The dubbing cost breakdown states the formula plainly: credits equals the dub job price times the number of languages, with the language count as the only term that multiplies.
The exact per-job figure is quoted at submission rather than published as a rate, which is genuinely how to plan it. Check the estimate on one dub, then multiply by your market count. That is the whole model, and it is the least interesting part of a localisation budget — because it is not where the chargeable events pile up.
The line items in a ten-market rollout
A finished ten-market rollout is not ten dubs. It is one master plus a per-language tail, and the tail is where the count grows.
| Line item | Charged per | Across ten markets |
|---|---|---|
| Source video generation | Once, when you made it | ×1 |
| Dub job | Each submitted target language | ×10 |
| Localised burned-in captions | Each captioned clip, per language | ×10 |
| Per-language export from the editor | Each final export | ×10 |
| Re-dub after a fix | Each resubmission | ×n |
| Editor preview passes | Free at 480p, short per-user cooldown | 0 |
Two rows deserve calling out.
The master does not multiply. Whatever the source video cost to generate was paid once and is amortised across every market. This is the strongest argument for localising something good rather than localising more things: the expensive creative work is a fixed cost against a growing denominator.
Captions are a separate job from dubbing. A dub replaces the spoken audio. It does not translate on-screen text or subtitles — that is a captioning job per language, with its own charge. And captioning carries a tier multiplier that has nothing to do with language: the basic preset tier bills at 1× and the premium animated tier at 2×, applied per clip. Across ten markets a purely aesthetic caption choice doubles a line item that already multiplies by market count. The caption cost breakdown works through the multiplier.
Three builds of the same ten markets
Expressed in chargeable events rather than credits, because the dub figure is quoted at submission and the caption and export figures are quoted at render time. The relative shape is what you are budgeting.
| Build | Dub jobs | Caption renders | Exports | Chargeable events |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio only, shared master, no localised captions | 10 | 0 | 0 | 10 |
| Localised captions on a basic preset, exported per language | 10 | 10 at 1× | 10 | 30 |
| Localised captions on a premium preset, exported per language | 10 | 10 at 2× | 10 | 40 in base-render terms |
Two thirds of the second build, and three quarters of the third, are not dub jobs. They are the tail.
That is the finding worth acting on. When people try to cut a localisation budget they cut markets, because markets are the visible multiplier. But the dub jobs are the smaller share of the event count in any build that also ships localised text. The faster saving is usually structural:
- Ship a single master with translated subtitle files rather than burned-in captions where the platform supports it. Burned-in captions are baked into the pixels at render time, so every wording change means another render.
- Lock the master before you fan out. Every resubmission is another dub job at the same price. A typo caught after ten dubs costs ten dubs.
- Export once per language, not per revision. Editor previews render at 480p at no credit cost with a short per-user cooldown between them, and only the final export is charged. Checking timing and caption placement in a preview is the free part. The editor cost breakdown has the count-versus-rate distinction.
- Mix caption tiers deliberately. The multiplier is per clip, so premium on your two largest markets and basic on the rest is a legitimate choice rather than an account-wide setting.
Check your ten markets are actually dub targets
This is the trap that reorders a rollout plan after it has been approved. Versely's voice stack covers 38 languages with voice cloning available across all of them, but the dub target list is narrower: 25 languages, as of the 2026-08-11 snapshot in the platform's language data.
The 25 dub targets are Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Marathi, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Languages that have voice coverage but are not on the dub target list include Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Filipino, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Persian and Slovak. If your ten-market plan includes Nordic or Central European markets, check the list before you build the budget, because "we have voices in that language" and "we can dub into that language" are different statements. The voice-over hub covers the voice side.
Two more constraints that bite at submission time rather than planning time. The source has to be media already hosted on Versely — a prior generation, an upload, or the output of another job. External links, YouTube included, are not accepted. And the two engines differ: the default handles audio or video up to 30 minutes with voice cloning and supports trimming inside the same submission, while the lip-synced engine is video-only, capped at 8 minutes, does not trim, and supports a subset of languages. Two dubbing engines and their hard limits covers the trade-off, and the dub video task page covers running it.
Deciding how many markets to fund
Because the dub charge is flat and language-invariant, the marginal market is priced identically to the first. There is no batch discount and no volume break — ten languages is ten jobs. That makes the decision unusually clean.
- Price one market end to end. One dub, one caption render if you are localising text, one export. Get the real quoted figures in-app for a single language.
- Multiply by market count. That is the honest projection, because nothing in the chain gets cheaper at volume.
- Rank markets by expected return, not by language difficulty. Difficulty is not a pricing dimension, so the only reason to prefer one market over another is what it returns.
- Fund the tail you actually need per market. Not every market needs burned-in localised captions and its own export. Tier the treatment by market size and the event count drops fast.
- Amortise the master. If the source video is expensive, more markets improve its unit economics rather than worsening them. If the source is cheap and disposable, the localisation tail may cost more than making a native piece.
That last point is the real strategic question, and it is covered properly in subtitle or dub, per market and on the translate-a-video task page.
FAQ
Do some languages cost more to dub than others?
No. Language is not a pricing dimension. The charge for a dub is the same whichever target you select, so a small market costs exactly what your largest one does. The only thing that multiplies your bill is how many target languages you submit.
Can I estimate dubbing cost from the per-second lipsync rates?
No, and doing so overstates it badly. Lipsync bills per second of finished clip. Dubbing is its own job type with a flat per-job charge. They share neither the meter nor the rate card, which is why a three-minute video across ten markets looks catastrophic under lipsync arithmetic and is not.
Is there a discount for dubbing ten languages at once?
There is no batch discount. Ten languages is ten jobs at the same price each. The available saving is in not dubbing markets you will not publish to, and in not re-dubbing because the master changed after you fanned it out.
Does a dub include translated subtitles?
No. A dub replaces the spoken audio. Translating on-screen text or captions is a separate captioning job per language, and burned-in captions are baked into the pixels at render time, so changing the wording later means paying for that render again.