How long should a product demo video be?

Short answer: about 60 seconds for most product demos. The right length depends on where the video plays and what the viewer already knows — a store preview has a hard limit, a training video has none.

Length by placement

Store previews have hard rules

App Store: an app preview must be 15 to 30 seconds long, and you can upload up to three per localization. The default poster frame is taken at five seconds, so put a readable screen there. Source: Apple's app preview specifications.

Google Play: the preview is a YouTube link, not an upload. Ads and monetisation must be off and the video must not be age-restricted. It may autoplay muted, and only the first 30 seconds do — so treat 30 seconds as the real length even if the video runs longer. Source: Google Play Console Help.

Both play muted at first, so the story has to work without sound: close-ups on the action, captions, no long talking-head intros.

Why 60 seconds is the default

A minute fits the seven beats a demo needs — hook, problem, three features, proof, call to action — at a pace a person can follow. That is about 6 to 10 screenshots plus a few close-ups, and 130–140 words of narration in English. Shorter, and you drop to one or two features. Longer, and you are teaching rather than selling, which is fine for onboarding but not for a homepage.

The script template lays the minute out beat by beat, with word budgets for English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

When to go shorter

• The product does one thing. A single-purpose tool rarely needs more than 30 seconds.
• The viewer is cold. On social feeds and ads, people decide in the first seconds; a 20-second cut with one strong close-up beats a minute nobody finishes.
• It is a store preview. The limits above are not suggestions.

When to go longer

• The viewer has already chosen you. New customers in onboarding and employees in training want the steps, not the pitch.
• The workflow has real steps. If skipping one means the viewer cannot do the task, keep it — but make one video per task instead of one long video for everything.
• A buyer asked for detail. A follow-up after a sales call can run two minutes.

Lengths in DemoScreen

In the Script step you choose a length from 0:30 to 3:00, and the narration is written to fit it. Free renders up to 1:00, Starter up to 1:30, Pro and Team up to 3:00. Usage is counted in credits — one credit is one second of finished video — so a 30-second cut costs half a 60-second one. Details are on the pricing page.

Each video can be landscape 16:9, vertical 9:16 or square 1:1; the gallery has the same product rendered in different shapes and lengths so you can compare. Or open the sandbox and try a length change on a sample project.

New to this? Start with the step-by-step guide: how to make a product demo video.