But they’d love Randy EATS
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Hahahah. Clearly.
Us brits have a schoolboy sniggering mentality when it comes to certain names…and unfortunately Randy, yours happens to be one. Not your fault that to us it hints at a certain promiscuity and no matter what you add before or after, we will always spot the double entendres!
No one would blink an eye if you went by Randolph, though!
Sorry!
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No need to apologize. I managed to work my way up the ranks at a British company and encountered it daily and I’ll never forget the day my idol, sitting next to him, gasped “Oh my word I almost forgot the g!” He was signing his name. His name was Angus. That moment of pure vulnerability has stuck with me to this day.
Also, see the “Why do we all feel like impostors” thread.
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To bring the topic out of the loo, I raised my rates slightly in 2021, and plan on doing so in 2022. It’s not uncommon for different clients to have different rates. It all boils down to who I want to with with. And if your projects are always pineapples, I’ll charge ya for it.
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Hi Dan,
dunno why you withdrew your post. I still have it in my mail box and will definitely be saving it for future reference. I totally concur with where you’re coming from and what you said. Some really valuable nuggets of info in there. Logged in just to “like” it.
I’d like to add that it’s always easy to drop your rate, but its not easy to get it back up especially with the same people. The same producers will expect it from you because you did it last time.
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You know what, I got embarrassed as I didn’t realize I made comments above earlier in the year. I thought I might have been repeating myself a little bit… but maybe I overreacted?
@Tallen I can and do appreciate your feedback. So I have re-posted:
This rate discussion should be had more often. I constantly come across freelancers who have no idea what they are offering clients with their bargain basement prices. There are at least 2-3 guys in this town that work under 1 rate… same price to help a vendor, agency, direct to client. This has effects on the whole industry, yet they have personal motives and reasons I guess.
Number 1, it is imperative if you are going to enter the freelance world, and/or run your own business that you fully understand/know the going rates in town. No, not just what your hourly rate should be… or what a flame salary is…but rather, what the Vendor’s have been charging their clients. I am constantly amazed at how little people know about this subject, and just seem to wing it. Don’t be afraid to pick up a phone and talk to a real working producer and pick their brains on this subject. You will find out quickly there are tiers to all rates… and you should consider those very same tiers for yourself and your business.
- Just because there is a cheap option out there… like Joe Blow… it does not mean you HAVE to do/offer the same thing. There 2 guys in town offering to work for almost half my rate and what I consider the going Flame rate. And they offer this price direct to Agencies too! full online and all deliverables… for flat day rate! I get quoted their numbers all the time. The reality is, it is their choice… but they can NOT do all the jobs. Also, I constantly question them… as I am a busy artist… why would you want to work 3 times as hard as me to make the same money? (see Randy’s comment about 3x tripling rate to agencies comment above).
Also, the day our job becomes a common salary, is the day I quit… I’d rather not deal with all the BS that comes along the way if I’m not being compensated appropriately.
- You know flame, yes… but you probably need to brush up on your business.
- If you are offering discounts on your jobs, make sure to include those discounts in your invoice . I will ALWAYS include the standard pricing of any item I charge for, and note the discount in percent if there is one. Clients then make a mental note you did them a favour, in addition… in the future you can actually charge them those full rates. if you don’t, clients will indeed use your old invoices against you as standard rates.
- Good Producers (and even the shitty ones) that work for professional vendors all know this stuff… use your past/previous experience and connections and talk to them about this.
I am open for discussion on this at any time… sadly, it seems like so many are harming our futures without even knowing it.
In general… my advice to anyone who wants to figure out how freelance rates should work…consider this simple formula. As far as just working for vendors…in its simplest form… work out what you think your salary should be. As a freelancer, you should be able to accumulate the same amount by working 1/3 of the time… b/c jobs are not as frequent and there is and always should be a premium for getting freelance help. Always been this way…until recently
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Thanks for posting this. As a freelancer moving into more direct work, it’s something I need to understand better. Your statement, “why would you want to work 3 times as hard as me to make the same money?” is excellent advice.
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These are just what I’ve seen large vfx studios pay freelancers per day. Most of the big 3-4 are flat day rates, no OT.
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I’m not saying it’ll work all the time with all the shops, but asking to be on an hourly rate (at least in California) will lock you into the state laws about overtime.
It’s rarely fun for us to negotiate this stuff, and frankly I’ve only managed in situations where I had a lot of holds waiting in the wings, but it’s worth remembering that once you establish your rate pretty much everyone stops caring even a little.
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@DanMargules - as someone about to take the freelance step, these are invaluable insights to me for all things that I should be considering and working out right now. Although we may all live in different locations globally, as freelancers I feel we’re all in the same boat because the internet has taken away borders. This discussion should be definitely more widespread and all freelancers would benefit from it.
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Here’s the thing. Clients have never had much more of an option other than calling a studio for work. Studio’s have had standard rates for years, yes they have changed a little… but for the most part they remain.
The pricing on services such as flame are not comprised of how many employees they have… so when someone responds to you by saying why are you charging just as much as so and so…well, those are the rates.Here are my questions in return:
Are your expectations for me to to turn the project around in the same amount of time, at the same level?
Personally, other than a 3 year stint of working at a big movie/commercial studio… the rest of my career and experience has been spent in the “boutique post shop” world. I am used to offering clients my very best on a day to day basis, and when clients hire me from home they get the very same in return, and often more.
Now, as for full rate. Even post shops don’t always get full rate, so yes, you can make deals. Although there should be limits and you should know the difference between a “deal” and a “steal”. The worst part about offering the steal, is that you will effect not only your own future jobs…but everyone else’s in the business as well. for example, you might be ok that you can offer an online at 1000$/day…but knowing that the rate lies somewhere between 3-6000 / day (north America)… ask yourself why a client would ever go back to a shop after this. Also… if you don’t care, you should learn a little thing about how much it costs our “clients” to purchase media time to air these Ads. It is literally HUNDREDS of times more expensive, so at the end of the day the big difference really is not big in the grand scheme. But if you are offering that bargain basement price you have zero clue how much it costs to make commercials and you are being “had”. a few thousand dollars difference will make a HUGE difference in your pocket, but in terms of the overall cost and budget of an average commercial… you are probably in the realm of a single percentage difference of the overall cost, they just make it seem like you are asking for the world. BS.
I have personally found that I quote every job on its own, all my clients know the official online rate is 5k a day (for myself, set by me…to match all studios in town). But when I am doing online I offer them a discount at 3500/day. Again they got all the same online supervision, postings, revisions that big shops offer and should feel no difference. They are getting about a 30% discount, and a whole lot of value as I tend to work a little harder for this knowing that my general Freelance Flame rate for any vendor in town is much lower at 1250/day. This should and usually satisfies the whole “but you’re only one guy, and why should I pay you all that money” comments.
So these are the tiers of the business that you can offer your clients in order to navigate turbulent waters of negotiations.
Don’t ever forget that offering to take care of a full up online on your own is a much bigger task with way more responsibilities than just freelancing for a studio where they take care of all that communication and take you under their security blanket. On your own, it’s just you! Why should you be expected to take on all that extra responsibility for the same money? Only the rich get richer this way.
I have another friend/colleague here in my city that freelances in the same way. We have almost the same amount of experience, only he actually owned his own studio with 30 employees at one point. We stay in touch and communicate frequently. We keep our lines of communication open about what we offer clients and the challenges as well… helping each other, rather than seeing each other as competition. It has worked really well for the both of us. The others in town who have not responded…well, like i mentioned in the previous post/novel I wrote. They work 3X as hard to get what we do…which do you want?
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I appreciate all this advice. I agree Dan, it does come down to producers flat out refusing to work with someone over a certain money amount. its different depending on who you ask. Generally i charge only $100 a day more for using my own kit, which is CHEAP but something that these companies are getting used to so starting off i wanted more work rather than get outright refused!
There is NO reason if we pay for software hardware, engineering, network, etc etc why we cant be closer to what agencies pay normally. Its not just common for some folk.
Upper management usually have a dollar price they wont go over for freelancers, quite ridiculous really even if they have run out of options and really need someone. The companies setting the price of our work is assbackwards if you ask me. NO other industry works like this and is why we gripe about it often.
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Burn it all down.
500 channels of nonsense is why the world is shit anyway.
People are being shot on the streets of Myanmar by their own brothers and sisters, and people are more concerned by some science fiction fantasy about the destiny of puppets, or the color of shoes…
I lament the way producers vacillate, discussing rules and systems and rates , then justifying why they don’t stick to their own game, and offering incentives and discounts, as if that makes the problem vanish like a conjuring trick.
It’s mendacious & weak.
This game would have been a race to the bottom if the contestants weren’t so damned greedy, fat, lazy & complicit.
I envision slugs and snails crawling into one of those vegetable trap glasses of beer to drown…
Maybe someone could do a test of some cg snails with sub surface scattering and a glass rendered with caustics and some bubble particles and fluid dynamics and all that…
How much would a test of a shot like that cost?
Could you do it by Monday?
How about if we made a non rate card deal?
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I honestly don’t charge Vendors (vfx houses) any extra for my machine, but 100$ extra is totally reasonable. Personally, the real money to be made is to skip the vendors and approach the very many clients who have been working with you over the years. That is, if you are on a senior level.
People often think they come to work with these companies, but really…it’s usually just one or 2 of us per job and the good clients know this. Go to them directly, charge a little less than the post shop but more than what you charge a vendor for helping them (like 2-3x more…you will be a bargain compared to the shops). That’s the ticket.
VFX shops don’t set the price, we do… you don’t have to agree to their prices… there’s a place in the middle somewhere. I have had clients that refused my rate in the beginning return and pay it without problems after having a bad experience with cheaper Artists. The only difference here is… if you want these things, you need to go out and get it yourself. Everyone is looking out for themselves.
It takes a little time to get going, but trust me, they come around.
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You can drive the Nurburgring in any old beater car.
It’s the hardest racetrack in the world and a public road.
You can take three or four of your mates (if you’ve got any) around as passengers.
You can pay for more than one lap and take it in turns.
You or your mates might be crap at driving and you might not make it the whole way round.
Your beater car might give up and you’ll have to pay to get your asses towed out.
You’ll never win the 24 hours of Nurburgring in an old beater car.
The cars that win the 24 hours of Nurburgring emerge looking as though they have been partially destroyed - like the race car equivalent of a beater car - but they’re clearly not beater cars.
The support crew and trucks of spare parts may never have been used or they may be almost depleted.
It’s not a cheap operation to win the worlds hardest 24 hour race.
Beater cars are not allowed to participate in the race as they are little more than dangerous obstacles.
If I were your prospective client and you had one computer on your desk (which I could buy from a shopping mall), some non enterprise storage (which I could buy from amazon), one rental license of software for which you have no technical support, no physical protection or prevention from fire or natural disaster, no insurance, no backup equipment in case your beater computer craps out, and no security policy or posture - I just wouldn’t take you seriously.
For some companies it is more important to be compliant than it is to get a bargain basement deal.
Compliance is expensive.
Insurance is even more expensive.
Security is even more expensive than that.
Redundancy over and above all is more expensive still.
Since there are no 100% guarantees in life, just attempting to get into the 99% guarantee range is an expensive business.
(Let’s not talk about human rating on spacecraft).
In amongst the chains of compliance must be trust and trust is priceless.
Some companies insist on a kind of guarantee that you can get the job done.
Is that misguided?
No it’s human nature - if I climb on to the big branch I’ll be safe, if I climb on to the weak, spindly, rotten branch I will fall from the tree and be eaten by the ravenous lions…
I just don’t hear anyone here talking about why your rates should be rising, commensurate with your experience, interest rates, costs of living, costs of doing business, rent increases, degrees of complexity, scope of work, and a billion other things.
Netflix subscriptions are not getting cheaper.
Disney plus subscriptions aren’t getting cheaper.
Your phone bill and your internet bill didn’t suddenly decrease.
I don’t see anyone (myself included) posting useful equations that might help to calculate fair rates and why you should pass those rates on to your customers.
It’s just a series of half-beliefs about why it’s justified to drop your prices, or to pretend that you’re worth the same as the company with the big investment, only to rollover and offer a 30% discount.
Every two or three years, sometimes four, this subject rises, and it never gets resolved.
Everyone is too busy watching their pixels get rearranged.
Doubt is the key.
Doubt that you’re worth it.
Doubt that someone will pay the bill.
Doubt that someone will give you repeat business.
Fuck doubt - you can either drive this car and win or you’re just a spectator at best.
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And another rant about that whole “I’ll give you a special discount…” thing:
If you went into McDonald’s and the rate card said $0.99 for the sandwich that you want;
And the manager walked over and said that unlike everyone else, you were special and offered you that sandwich for $0.69…
What would you do?
Me? I’d be deeply suspicious about her motives…
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Found this great article on Mixinglight.com about rates.
I hope it’s ok to throw the link in.
Pay Transparency - What Are Current Rates for US Colorists and DITs?
One thing that never gets mentioned is that everyone has different financial circumstances. eg, Someone with a non working partner with 3 kids living at home with an 800k mortgage vs someone in a completely opposite situation and not needing as much money to live off. This is where I think rates can vary also. The person with more financial debt will take on any budget (who will drive the rates down) vs the person who will charge more because they don’t have expenses.
I recently started a project with a very strict NDA agreement which bars me from ever showing this work on my reel, even after it has aired.
That doesn’t really make sense to me and seems unfair. Shouldn’t this warrant a higher rate as a form of compensation?