How many hours a week does your channel actually cost?

Where the numbers come from, and the argument behind them

No platform will tell you it sets your cadence. YouTube says each video is judged on its own and that it tries to re-surface creators after a break. Instagram lists watch time, likes and sends as its signals and never mentions frequency. TikTok is the only one that publishes a number, and it is one to four posts a day.

What channels that break out actually do is different. In the largest studies available, breakout long-form YouTube channels post about 1.6 times a week, breakout Shorts channels about 5.4 times a week, and a silent week underperforms your own baseline on every platform. That is the cadence the platform rewards. It is observed, not decreed, and it is real whether or not anyone admits it.

The thesis of this tool is that early channels rarely die from bad content. They die because the creator picked a format whose production load cannot be sustained at that cadence, on top of a life. The math never got done. Burn Rate does the math.

Cadence breakout channels post at

Hours per upload, by format and stage

Defaults are creator-reported estimates built from editor rate cards (20 to 60 minutes of editing per finished minute for most YouTube formats, one to two hours for motion-heavy work) and self-reports. Editing is usually 40 to 60 percent of the total. Cooking and product review have no surveyed numbers anywhere, so those rows are inferred and marked. Every field is editable. Your numbers beat mine.

How the verdict is computed

Burn rate is hours per upload multiplied by the rewarded cadence, compared with the hours you said you have. Under 60 percent of your time is idling. 60 to 90 is sustainable. 90 to 125 is running hot. 125 to 175 is burning. Above that is a flameout. Format debt is the weekly shortfall. Runway assumes most people can borrow about 40 hours from sleep and weekends before something breaks, and counts the weeks until that debt is spent. The idea-and-packaging share is compared with the roughly 30 percent that top channels spend on ideas, titles and thumbnails, against about 5 percent for most small channels.

Privacy

Everything is computed in your browser. If you type your own hours, the numbers are saved anonymously: platform, format, cadence, hours a week, hours per stage, which of those you changed, and the verdict. No name, no email, no channel, no IP address, and the date is kept to the month. (Netlify's standard server logs still apply; see /privacy.) That is the raw material for a yearly "how long an upload really takes" report, once there are enough results to say something. If you leave the estimates as they are, nothing is saved. The site's cookieless analytics also count which format, platform and verdict came up.

Sources

AIR Media-Tech, 18,000 YouTube channels · OverseerOS, 168 breakout channels · Buffer posting-frequency guide · Buffer, 52M posts (silent-week effect) · Socialinsider TikTok benchmarks · TikTok Creator Academy · Buzzsprout podcast stats · beehiiv 2025 newsletter report · StreamScheme · ReelRate editing times · EditVideo.io · Nebinski, hours per podcast episode · Paddy Galloway via Colin & Samir (packaging share) · YouTube on breaks and burnout