You've hit the point where audio can't stay on your editor's plate anymore. Good, that's progress. Now you're staring down two options, and neither one is as clean as it looks on paper.
Freelancers feel like the low-commitment answer. No payroll, no benefits, no long-term obligation. But scroll through enough creator and agency forums and you'll find plenty of people venting about the same pattern: lackluster results, work that goes over budget, freelancers who go quiet mid-project. That's not every freelancer, but it's common enough to be a real risk, and it's the risk you're taking on when the relationship is one person with no backup and no process behind them. Freelance rates for audio and video work typically run $25 to $150 an hour depending on experience, which sounds flexible until you factor in the time you spend managing it, chasing availability, re-briefing someone new when your last freelancer gets booked out, catching quality issues before a client does. Freelancers work well for a one-off need. They're a much less stable foundation for something you need consistently.
Hiring in-house feels like the serious move, and for some agencies at real scale, it is. The average sound engineering technician earns around $74,100 a year according to federal labor data. Once you add the standard costs that come with any employee, such as health insurance, onboarding, training, and payroll taxes, that number climbs meaningfully higher before the person has mixed a single project. Those overhead costs aren't unique to audio; they're true of hiring anyone full-time. What is unique to creative production is how uneven the workload gets. Some weeks you've got five videos that need a full mix. Other weeks you've got one. A full-time hire gets paid the same either way, and if you try to keep them busy during the slow weeks by having them help with editing or color, you're right back in the trap we've written about before: stretching a specialist across disciplines they weren't hired for, which is exactly the kind of Agile-style flexibility that hurts creative work instead of helping it.
Neither option is wrong. They're just built for different situations. An employee gives you someone who is consistently present, which has real value, but it can end up costing more than expected for reasons unrelated to their skill. A freelancer gives you flexibility, but you're trading consistency and process for it, and process is exactly what an individual freelancer usually doesn't have. There's a third path that solves for both problems at once. Bringing in an audio production agency as a dedicated audio partner gets you the consistency of a full-time hire, since you're working with the same team on every project instead of whoever happens to be free, along with the flexibility of a freelancer, since you're not paying a fixed salary during the weeks your audio needs are lighter.
Riot Anthem Studios works with video production agencies as exactly that kind of audio production agency. Same point of contact every project, dialogue cleanup and mixing built around your delivery schedule, no ramp-up period because the relationship itself is the job. You get consistency without the overhead of a full-time hire, and reliability without the coin-flip of a freelancer.
Freelance versus full-time isn't really the full decision. It's freelance, full-time, or a dedicated audio production agency built to avoid the tradeoffs of both. It's worth knowing that option exists before you commit to either of the first two.