How to price your work and dealing with revisions
Alright, let’s talk cold, hard cash! No, but seriously - before I dive into this, I want to mention that it’s perfectly fine if you want to do 3D as a hobby. If that’s you, you can read on and enjoy it all from a “thank goodness I don’t have to worry about this stressful nonsense and can just have fun 3D-printing things in my retirement” perspective.
I’ve noticed that on the Blender subreddit, a lot of the posts are variations of “how much can I charge for this” and “how much should I charge my client?”
Usually, the work displayed is not (yet) very professional.
And that’s fine! We’ve all been there. The most painful to read, for me are the posts that go along the lines of “I’m charging 5$ for this, is that too much?”.
I’ve been there. Before I start rambling about clients and revisions: I was actually very lucky and all (okay, most of) my clients were awesome. In hindsight, they really took a leap of faith hiring me, a beginner without much of a portfolio.
Most of the frustration I had on these projects, was due to my own inexperience with creating quotes, pricing and communication. Honestly, these things are so important. It’s not just about moving Vertices around! (Again unless you just do this as a hobby, in that case, have fun moving those Vertices around!)
When I was starting out as a freelancer, as a classic beginner mistake, I was underpricing my work. Not as low as 5$, but I was charging for example: 6,000 EUR for a corporate video (for a client with a revenue literally in the billions) …that took me 3 months to finish.
In case you live in a very different economic situation: 2,000 EUR / month is not enough to survice as a freelancer in Europe. You’ll need at least 5,000 EUR to keep the lights on, due to taxes, social security payments etc.
My mistake: If I had made the same video for myself, it would have indeed taken 1 month. Still not really a great payment for an architectural visualisation of a new building for a billion-euro revenue corporate client, but hey - I could have paid the bills. However, I wasn’t counting on 2 months of “revisions” when I made the quote.
While revisions are always hard to predict, especially with a new client. You can protect yourself. You can say, for example: The price for first delivery of the video is 6,000 EUR (30% up front on acceptance of the quote, 30% after the storyboard + voice over is made, and then 40% on delivery).
Then, you can say for example: they get 1 round of revisions for that price. If they want more, then you start working with an hourly rate (of 50 or 60 EUR). For context, we’re talking here about a corporate video consisting of 60 to 90 seconds of motion graphics / 3D animation with voice over (voice over cost has to be added on top, it’s usually at least 400 to 600 euro for that length).
Note that agencies typically charge higher prices for these types of videos, but their price includes more overhead, and they usually add some “marketing” package on top (and then they typically outsource the video to someone on Fiver).
Here is something I would recommend: You can’t really dictate to an agency, that you do maximum 3 rounds of revisions. They just won’t accept it, because they know that their client won’t understand.
But if it’s your own client instead of theirs, that you’re working for, you can tell them that you do maximum 3 rounds of revisions. Because you have other projects lined up, so you really only have that much time.
You’re actually doing your client a big favour: This forces them to list all the points that they want to see revised more efficiently. And they will get what they want faster.
If they get infinite revisions, sure you get paid per hour. But it will just go on, and on… Here’s a story from revision hell: One time I worked for an additional year on a project, after it was for all intents and purposes, finished.
Not full time, but an hour here, an hour there. Maybe 4 hours per week. They just kept inviting seemingly random people to give feedback. They happily paid an additional 10K in hourly rates on top of if I remember it correctly, about 6K of the initial project price. Eventually I just couldn’t work on it anymore as I was too busy with other things (and felt I’d lose my sanity if I had to do more revisions), and I handed it over to another freelancer.
I was getting too busy with Blender Secrets at that time, and felt that I could be happier working on my e-book. A year later, the client called me out of the blue, to ask for some files. They were still working on the same thing… Legend has it, they’re still working on it to this day.
But anyway, how should YOU price your work?
Well, before we start there are a couple of things.
First, you need to be good enough.
And second, you need to not be desperate.
Because if you’re desperate, you can’t say no to clients that you don’t really want to work for.
How do you know if you’re good enough? Keep posting your work on social media, and at some point clients will come to you. You’ll know when you’re good. You won’t be asking what you should charge on the Blender subreddit any more.
That saves you a lot of time that I personally spent chasing clients, as a beginning freelancer. When you’re chasing clients (cold calling, visiting “networking events”, dreadful stuff that you really should not be doing), you’re not making money and you’re not getting better at 3D.
How do make sure you’re not desperate? The previous part, posting work on social media, should be done from the comfort of having a job or some other situation where you don’t have to make money from 3D.
You should be in a position that you can say NO to ALL clients who come knocking on your social media door.
If you have to work a McJob for that, fine. Live in your grandma’s basement for a while. Whatever it takes. Make sure you still have some energy in the morning or evening, because you’re going to be using it to get better at your art.
If you can say NO to all the potential clients, you can weed out the bad ones. And you can afford to say YES to the serious client who will pay the right amount, on time. If they say you’re too expensive, just say: “Yep, I’m very expensive. In the future, I’ll only be more expensive than now.” It’s their problem that they don’t have the budget, don’t make it yours.
Keep in mind, that if you say yes to a client with a budget that is really too small, you’re really saying NO to a better client, who may show up the next day. You’ll be too busy working on that first client’s low budget project. You’ll have to turn them down. That would suck!
Okay, but you still haven’t told me how much I should charge?
Right. It depends on a lot of things. Location seems to be a big one, here in Europe. For example I charged 40 EUR / hour most of the time I was freelancing, and increased it to 50 when I got a bit more experienced. But I know people who charge 60 EUR / hour. This is in Belgium, for context. If you go to more expensive countries like Switzerland, they charge maybe double that. In other words, 400 - 500 EUR per day at least.
I do recommend, once you can estimate well how much time something will take (a very difficult, but essential skill!) that you charge a project-based price instead of hourly.
Don’t sell your time! You only have so much of it. There’s a ceiling to how much you can make with an hourly rate, but there’s no limit to how much you can charge for a project.
But do indicate that when there’s scope creep that makes you work longer on it, because of extra demands of the client (“can you render some stills?”, “Can you make a short for YouTube?” etc), you’ll charge additional on top of that. If you don’t do that, they’ll keep asking for stuff. It’s doesn’t cost them anything extra, after all - why shouldn’t they ask for those things if you’ll just do them for free? This is also not out of maliciousness by the way, clients often just don’t have any idea how much work all this stuff is.
Estimating how long something will take, is something you learn over time. I highly recommend keeping track of your time on projects. Personally I use Clockify for this, which is a free web-based time tracking service. Before that, I just used a Google spreadsheet.
This is also where learning and practicing your 3D skills while doing a McJob pays off: Not only will you get better, and will you grow your social audience, but you will learn how long it takes you to create something.
Then when you know for example, that it takes 60 hours to make a specific type of model, well then that’s 3,000 EUR (60 hours x 50 EUR) minimum. If there’s a round of revisions included, add more to that.
It ALWAYS takes more time to make something for a client, than for yourself. Even when communication is great, and there’s no scope creep. After all, you can see the exact idea you have in your head, but you can’t see into your client’s head. It always takes more time, trust me on this.
Thanks for reading!
