Hello all,
I’ve got a job coming up where I’d be working from my home studio with my flame hardware. It’s a P620 with an A5000 and 16TB of RAID protected SSD storage. I do a lot of WFH but nearly always remoting into an existing flame, it’s been a good few years since I charged for hardware on top of my day rate so I wondered what the good people of the Logik forum felt was a fair price to charge?
There can be a $7500 price delta between the cheapest and most expensive CPU, so you should list that and the RAM spec.
Hey !
From what I know, some freelancers don’t charge for it while others charge between $100 and $250 per day. For some it’s a fixed amount while others adapt based on the client and their needs. For companies, it’s much more.
I used to get $200-$250/day machine fee for my HP Z8, but as time went on clients would balk at the fee. Funnily enough, they had no problem with me just raising my day rate by the same amount 
This.
When you lock yourself out of your house, you don’t pay for the tools, you pay the locksmith, and her rate increased above the rate of inflation.
There are two schools of thought - itemizing or just day rate.
If the tools you use are pretty standard (Flame license, mid-size system, standard monitors, maybe a Mocha/Syntheyes license) - there’s nothing gained by itemizing, because everyone and every job requires the same.
Kit fees make a lot more sense in work where the type and size of the kit hugely variable - are we doing single camera coverage with a 3 light kit, or are we doing three camera coverage with a full truck worth of lights and grip?
Don’t give clients another thing to haggle with you on. Just included it in your day rate.
If they require something unique - like a $30K HDR reference monitor, you can charge them for that.
All that being said - you can have a loan-out day rate, where you remote in, and you can have a studio day rate, which is when you provide everything (including Frame IO, etc.)
Hey! Congrats on the upcoming job! Charging for hardware on top of your day rate is definitely reasonable. What’s your day rate looking like? And how many days do you expect to work on this project? That’ll help us give you a better idea of what to charge for the hardware.
There’s no real right wrong answer. Some people don’t charge for it because they just wanna work in their crocs. Some people invest a lot to provide high levels of service.
0-$350 a day roughly.
Imaginary Client: I heard from someone that Flame runs on a Macbook Pro. Why are you charging $350? You can use one of our laptops.
In today’s market - keep your attack surface as small as possible and impress with results, not number of lines on the invoice.
As suggested I’m simply offering a day rate with and without my flame and license rather than atomising the equipment I have. I’ve gone with circa $150 per day which seems fair as it’s a reasonably lengthy booking. Thanks for all your thoughts and insights, very helpful!