There is a good precedent for this question: Commercial Photography
The Old Times
Back in the heyday of photography (pre DSLR revolution), commercial photography was priced by value. It was an industry wide agreement between the photographers and the art buyers on the client side (who back then were specialists, not random marketing assistants) that photos would be priced on usage (value). There were lists, databases, and accepted history on pricing (you can still see remnants of it if you price rights managed images on Getty).
The pricing was pegged by days, geography, audience, medium and brand and a few other factors.
A shot of a piping hot slice of pizza used by a local restaurant in the Sunday newspaper insert would cost $250. That exact same shot (same file) with exclusive rights, used by a national chain would cost $75,000 because of the audience difference. Didn’t matter how much time the photographers spent making it.
It worked, until you had an influx of new photographers with DSLR cameras in hand, who had not come up through the ranks of the industry. They didn’t know and didn’t understand the customs of the industry. In parallel images were increasingly bought different people in companies and placed on share drives, and there were no longer professional art buyers as gate keepers.
So the whole system largely collapsed.
The Counter Narrative
I’ve heard Andy and others tell this countless times: Picasso and the napkin, the photographer and the tourist, and other variations of the same plot:
Picasso draws a picture on napkin. Couple across the table asks for the price. He says $250K. They say, but you drew 5 min on a napkin. He says, yes, but it took me 40 years to learn how to draw like that.
There is no perfect answer, and the answer changes over time, is different for different artists and different markets.
My Experience
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First of all, any decision is defensible if you can state your assumptions. Don’t make numbers up. Pick what is a proper day rate for your work, and estimate the numbers a shot takes. That’s your starting point.
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Keep track of your time. As we all know, especially in our line of work, sometimes the stars align and you can breeze through a shot, and another time the track will not stick, and it’s a monster, and you take three times a long as you thought.
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Use the number of hours it would take you on average to do a shot like this. If you’ve done this long enough and enough shots, and kept track of time (mentally or in notes) you should know the average time.
Charge the average hours it would take to do this shot. If you got lucky today, take the win, and charge 2 days even if it only took 4hrs (as long as 2 days is your actual average). Other days, the shot turns into a monster and it takes 3 days, but you still charge 2. Trust the data and that it will average out.
Footnote: if it takes much longer because of unforeseen circumstances, then it’s ok to discuss with the client that your estimate was off, and the price needs to be higher. Example: the client gives you camera tracking data from the MoCo rig, but you find out the data are bad and it needs to be re-tracked (happened to me twice in recent memory).
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Ask the client for their budget. I have clients that have specific numbers they use for certain jobs. If they do tell me (and they usually do during booking) I will invoice for that number, even if it usually takes less time.
As they say, don’t make them think too hard. If that is their budget, they don’t win if you make it cheaper, and in fact you may create problems for them, becaue they may have argued in a production meeting that it would take 2 days (because the Resolve guy took at that long last time), and now you make them look like they didn’t know what they’re talking about.
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Do know the value of the work you’re doing, and set your rate accordingly. You don’t want to undercharge consistently relative to the market or you make a lot of other folks unhappy. You are worth your experience, your time, and your tools.
You can defend every decision if you are clear about your assumptions. Then you can argument about the assumptions (this should take x days because of…). If you make things up seemingly randomly, you likely will lose the plot.