Pricing
How much does a medical animation cost?
A custom 3D medical animation typically costs between $1,500 and $30,000 per finished minute, depending on who makes it and how complex the science is. Freelancers sit at the bottom of that range, specialist studios in the middle, and full-service agencies well above it. Addax works at $3,500 to $6,000 per finished minute, with projects starting at $3,000 for a 30-second piece. Most projects in this field are 60 to 90 seconds long, which is the length that fits an investor deck, a congress loop and a website without being recut. The single most misleading thing about per-minute pricing is that it implies a 30-second animation costs half what a 60-second one does. It does not. A significant part of every project — understanding the science, writing the script, storyboarding — costs the same regardless of runtime.
What the market actually charges
| Who makes it | Per finished minute | What you're paying for |
|---|---|---|
| Freelance / marketplace | $1,500 – $4,000 | Individual animators, often without a medical or scientific background. Cheapest, and the widest quality spread. |
| Specialist medical studio Addax | $5,000 – $20,000 | Where Addax sits. Clinical review built into the process, and a short path between a question and an answer. |
| Mid-market studio | $20,000 – $30,000 | Larger teams with account management, longer timelines, and a substantial fixed cost before animation starts. |
| High-end agency | $25,000 – $80,000+ | Full-service agencies, typically working with large pharma and enterprise device budgets. |
In practice: $3,000 for a 30-second piece where the science is already settled, $5,000 for a 60–90 second mechanism built from your literature, and $9,000+ for molecular-scale work under multi-stakeholder review. All three tiers are published here.
A note on where these numbers come from: almost every published medical animation price online comes from a studio's own marketing, and the sources disagree with each other — particularly in the middle of the range. The bands above are drawn from the handful of studios that publish real rate cards. Treat them as the shape of the market rather than as precise figures.
Why a 30-second animation doesn't cost half of a 60-second one
Every project carries a fixed cost before a single frame is animated: understanding the science, agreeing what the animation will show, writing the script, and storyboarding it. At larger studios that block of work runs into five figures on its own — which is why some mid-market studios quote $25,000 for thirty seconds.
This is the clearest structural reason to use a specialist studio for short-form work. The animation time for thirty seconds is genuinely half of sixty seconds. The overhead attached to it is not, and a studio built around a short decision path carries far less of it. If what you need is a 60-second mechanism for a Series A deck, that gap is most of the difference in the quote.
What drives the number
- Duration
- The obvious one, and the least useful on its own. Every additional second of finished animation is animation time and render time — but the per-minute rate falls as runtime grows, because the fixed costs are spread further.
- Scale and complexity
- Molecular work is the most expensive thing in medical animation. Thousands of individually simulated elements cost more than a single device deploying, even when the runtime is identical. A surgical sequence sits between the two.
- How much science has to be worked out first
- A mechanism you can already describe precisely is cheaper to animate than one that has to be reconstructed from papers. Existing pathway diagrams, CAD files and published figures shorten this stage directly.
- How many people review it
- Device projects are commonly reviewed by marketing, regulatory, clinical, legal and sometimes a surgeon advisory board. That is not a difficulty problem, it is a calendar problem — and it is the most common reason a short project becomes a long one.
- What comes with it
- Voiceover, custom music, alternate cuts, captions and localisation are separate line items everywhere in this industry. A per-minute figure almost never includes them.
Two of those dominate in practice. Molecular and cellular sequences carry the heaviest simulation cost of anything in this field, which is why they sit at the top of every rate card — what that work involves is set out on the mechanism of action animation page. Device projects are more often priced by the review calendar than by the modelling, and starting from CAD you already own removes most of the reconstruction stage: that is covered on the medical device animation page.
How to get a number for your project
Per-minute rates are a starting point, not a quote. What actually determines the figure is the specific mechanism, the audience, and how much of the science is already settled. Send those three things and you get a written scope back — what is covered, what is delivered, how many review rounds are included, and the date it lands.
Addax publishes its own tiers rather than quoting blind: see what a project costs here. If you are pre-revenue and raising, the budget question works differently and is covered on its own page.
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