Search for what faceless channels make and you get a wall of numbers with nothing behind them. The cost side is duller and far more useful, because it is knowable in advance and it decides whether the earnings question is worth asking at all.
Below is the monthly bill at three volumes. Prices are what they are in August 2026 and they move, so treat the shape as the point rather than the exact totals.
The three real line items
Editing, narration, and your own time. Everything else is optional or free.
Editing is the cheapest of the three. CapCut is free for what this format needs, and Pro is $19.99 a month after a price increase that surprised a lot of people this year. For story Shorts the free tier covers it: text-to-speech, auto captions, overlays, watermark-free export on standard edits. Pro buys effects and stock that this format does not touch.
Narration is where the pricing model matters more than the price. Free tiers exist on most TTS services and run out fast at any real volume, and paid ones bill per character, so the bill scales with exactly the thing you are trying to increase. Local models cost nothing per character and now sound fine at Shorts pace, which is why more channels are moving to them.
Memes are free if you build your own folder. Which is not really free, and that is the next section.
Thumbnails, music, stock footage: mostly zero for this format. Story Shorts do not use stock, Shorts thumbnails barely matter, and background music is free on every platform.
The line item that actually dominates
Your time, and it is not close.
Doing this by hand runs about 30 to 60 minutes per video, and the breakdown is lopsided: roughly twenty of those minutes is not editing at all, it is hunting for a reaction image that fits each punchline.
At three videos a week that is about six hours a month. At one a day it is fifteen to thirty. At three a day, which is the volume the format actually rewards, it is 45 to 90 hours a month, which is a part-time job with no salary attached.
Put any hourly value on that and it swamps every subscription on the list. This is the number that decides whether a channel survives past month two, and it is the one nobody puts in the cost article.
The bill at three volumes
Three videos a week. Software: $0 to $20. Time: about 6 hours. Nothing here is worth optimizing yet — you are still finding out whether you like doing this.
One a day. Software: $0 to $30. Time: 15 to 30 hours. This is where the per-character TTS bill starts being noticeable and where the manual meme search starts feeling like the job rather than part of it.
Three a day. Software: $20 to $60 once you are paying for narration at volume. Time: 45 to 90 hours. At this point the software costs are rounding errors against the time, and the only question that matters is which step you automate.
What is worth paying for, in order
Automating the meme search first, because it is the largest block of time and the one that does not improve with practice. Recall is the bottleneck, and you cannot get better at remembering more memes than you have seen.
Narration second, and mainly to get off per-character pricing rather than to improve quality. At three a day the pricing model matters more than the voice does, and the quality gap is smaller than it looks once captions and memes are carrying half the delivery.
Editing last, or never. CapCut's free tier genuinely covers this format, and $19.99 for effects you will not use is the easiest line to cut.
The cost nobody prices
A copyright strike. Three in 90 days ends the channel, removes everything you have uploaded, and bars new accounts, which means every hour above is at risk from one annoyed author.
It is not a monthly cost, it is a tail risk, and it is worth a few minutes of thought precisely because the expected value math is so lopsided. What that exposure actually looks like is cheap to understand and cheap to avoid.
How Memecut does this
Memecut is 9 USDT for 30 days, with a free tier of three renders a day, and it goes at the line item that dominates the table above rather than the ones that do not.
Paste a script and voice, word-level captions, and a real reaction meme on each punchline are produced automatically. The narration is a local model, so nothing is billed per character no matter how much you write. What that replaces is not the twelve minutes of dragging overlays around; it is the twenty minutes of trying to remember which meme fits this specific line, which is the block that does not shrink with experience.
Payment is USDT on TRC-20 and there is no card option, which is a real limitation and worth knowing before you get to the checkout rather than at it.
What to remember
Software for this format is $0 to $60 a month depending on how much you have automated, and CapCut's free tier is genuinely enough for the editing. The dominant cost is 30 to 60 minutes per video, two thirds of which is finding memes rather than editing, and at daily volume that becomes a part-time job. Automate the meme search before anything else, get off per-character narration pricing second, and skip the editor subscription. See what the automated version of that step costs you in time before deciding it is worth doing by hand.