Exactly, and charging less doesn’t even land you more work. In my experience, raising my rates has always made it easier to find work. If you err on the side of being overpriced, you’ll know quite soon because it’s hard to find work. If you err on the lower side, your rates could be locked in for months at a time while signaling a race to the bottom. We should all be discouraging this kind of signaling.
Testing out a 50% increase in your rate every quarter should be seen like eating your vegetables. I’m seeing people from India with healthier rates and hoping the overseas crowd keeps testing the waters. Since this career path has uniquely inherent risks, what our clients pay for is not just the deliverable. Our compensation today should reflect the risk of obsolescence 10-20 years down the road.
When people say things like “I just charge what I think is fair,” they often don’t realize what fairness means in a world where AI (among many things) can spoil the whole pot. ‘Fair’ would be more like $1000/hr so you could save a nest egg in 2 years. That’s really what I think a person competent with Nuke, Houdini, or Flame deserves. And the closer the AI threat looms, the higher the value, all the way to the point of obsolescence.
Do I think the freelance VFX community knows their own value enough to stand for this? I don’t know, but the Flame community seems like the harbinger of sensibility. If we signal a race to the bottom, others hear it, and before long we all get robbed. And just because our rates have been normalized, it doesn’t mean they represent our actual value.
I agree that my rate of $80/hr. is relatively low. My excuse is that when you see the majority of ‘Senior’ VFX artists on Upwork charging $80/hr, it just looks like the thing to do. Almost no Houdini artists have as high as $150/hr on their profile. I’m going to make amends by doubling my rate while working on my website for the next couple of months. I’m prepared for 1-2 years of no new clients, but have a feeling I won’t have trouble landing work through LinkedIn or my website.
If a platform has a culture of racing to the bottom, the best you can do is leave it on read while sending a strong message. I won’t waste my time sending proposals anymore on Upwork until I see hourly rates in the hundreds per hour normalized. It would benefit the entire VFX community if everyone who doesn’t have an Upwork account (especially Flame Artists), makes one, sets a rate in the hundreds on their profile, and leaves it. I’m seeing more people wise up to the fact that you don’t have to (nor should you) start low. My very first Houdini job paid $3K for a few hours of work. I didn’t even start getting responses from potential clients until I raised my rate to $80/hr.
My strategy for the rest of 2024 is to set the price to upper extremes, work on inbound marketing (regularly posted promo shorts on LinkedIn), and let them come to me. If Adobe wants to make prompt ‘artists’ out of marketing execs, then any VFX artist worth their salt will need to upgrade their title to Founder & Creative Director of their own production house. Every client of mine that ever had a substantial budget contacted me out of the blue. Anyone with over $10K to spend is actively headhunting for talent, not waiting to be approached.
