Disclaimer first: the team is hypothetical — five editors and a producer sharing cuts with clients. The prices are real market prices you can check yourself. The point is the math, and the math is generic: replace "video review" with any file-review workflow and the shape holds.
What they rent today
A Frame.io-style review platform on a team plan, seats for everyone who touches a cut:
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01
The review platform itself
Team-tier pricing, per-seat, billed annually. Five to eight seats in active use ≈ €120–€170/mo depending on tier and storage. The price went up twice in three years; nobody at the studio chose the new price.
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02
Storage overages
4K masters and client archive requests blow past the included quota. Overage fees average another ≈ €20–€40/mo. Rented storage is the only kind where the bill grows with your success.
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03
The human middleware tax
Comments live in the platform, tasks live in the tracker, files live in the drive. Someone copies between them every day. ≈ 3–5 hours/mo of skilled people doing data entry — the subscription's invisible twin.
Itemized: €140 + €30 + 4 hours ≈ €170/mo plus invisible labor, or €2,040/year for the visible part alone.
What an owned review tool costs
One flat build: €690. Upload page, timecode-anchored comments, approval statuses, client links that expire, files staying on your own storage. One month of the rented tool, bought once, owned forever.
And this is where ownership beats even the price math: the rented platform changes its pricing, its UI, and its export formats whenever it wants. The owned tool changes when you want — add a per-client approval board, an auto-watermark, a Slack ping on new comments. It's your code. No feature request queue, no upgrade-tier hostage situation.
The crossover month
€690 build ÷ €170/mo rented ≈ month 5. Under a year, then it's pure savings — and the storage overage line item never returns, because the files were yours from day one.
When renting still wins
If you need zero setup, enterprise compliance certs, or you review 400 hours of footage a month with 40 collaborators, stay rented — the build price scales up and the platform's polish is real. The honest test is always the same: price your actual seat count, then compare against the one-off. If the crossover month is under a year, owning usually wins.