How to charge for your 3D services

I’m often asked how to work out how to charge for your 3D services. It’s strange because we assume this would be the most straight forward question to answer. Money is the life blood of your company so you should be adequately rewarded for the services your provide, but you also don’t want to price yourself out of the market or rip off your clients.

The fees that you charge will vary from person to person and company to company, so there is no steadfast rule on how much to charge, however, the way that this number is arrived at should be roughly the same.

Some basic analysis of your overheads and spending should be done first. This should be an holistic fee, covering every input that goes into your business, including hardware, software, rent, salaries, insurance, medical, sundries, professional services (accountant, lawyer) and so on. Once you have arrived at a number that accurately reflects the total spend input over a period of a typical month, you should now break that fee down into a time unit. This is your RAW, GROSS cost to do business. Be sure to include your salary and drawings into the Gross fee, this should not be considered profit, but rather the cost of you doing business.

There are 160 work hours in a month (8 hours per day, 5 days a week, and 4 weeks in a month). Divide the gross fee you arrived at, by the month’s hours and you now have your Gross hourly rate. You will now need to decide on a fair price markup (Your Profit) and add that to your hourly rate.

If you have multiple staff then this equation may vary slightly, we factor in salaries to ascertain the different rates to attach to different functions. A lighting artist will cost more than a modeler etc. So you may end up with different hourly rates for different people.

The last step in determining your pricing package can only be ascertained by experience. You should be able to identify how many hours a TYPICAL illustration should take; you could factor in the complexity of this particular job etc.

Once you have your hourly rate you be highly flexible in how you charge for your services. You can break down a job into modeling and lighting and post production with minimum fuss.

Remember your inflationary increase of your hourly rate every year, this will naturally curve your prices year on year.

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