Other: Poll, price, money and your hourly rate

Poll, price, money and your hourly rate

  • Total voters
    21
  • Poll closed .
allenfacemire said:
Rates are subjective at best. I base mine on union scale and up it for 10 hour rate and then give it a little boost. Remember union scale is just that. That's minimum paid.
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Wot union? There might be a union where you are but a different one where I am (or none at all). This is why a book like Publmix is suggesting will have to be different for each country. Also it is guidence for novices who don't know there is a union not for people with years of experience. People like yopu who don't stick to union rates but through experience can modify them.

OTOH how would you know what to charge if you were asked to work in another country? Foreign/overseas Union rates would be meaningless. You would need something to tell you who things work in the other country.
 
yoclay said:
Totally right.
However, I might suggest that it is not just because one is "good".

Unfortunately, I have watched budgets drop with the "democratization" of all of the graphic arts industries.
The only answer that I can see to all of this is to become so special in terms of what you do that really no one else can offer this.
But you are still going to need an art director to fight for you.
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You are very right about the democratization. And that is the dilemma of these days, eveybody can be a writer, filmer, photographer or a blogger, and publish on the internet.

One way to keep going is to specialize, another way is to go broader and sell your films or stories yourself.

"I can Type 300 words a minute on my mighty state-of-the-art IBM typewriter" "Who cares about your typewriter, we don't needs a typist, we need storywriters."

What I want to say is, times are changing fast, who want's to stay in business has to be willing, and to be able, to change too.
 
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One of the best things I ever did, no matter how scary it was, was start to say no to jobs. If the rate or conditions made it so that I couldn't guarantee work of a certain standard (MY standard not theirs) I duck out.
 
Ben Scott said:
One of the best things I ever did, no matter how scary it was, was start to say no to jobs. If the rate or conditions made it so that I couldn't guarantee work of a certain standard (MY standard not theirs) I duck out.
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+1

I'll bet that saved you a lot of trouble, mostly these clients are not the best ones.

It is my first advice to freelancers who are busy but have the feeling they don't earn enough, get rid of your low-paying clients and raise your rate. The bad clients will drop off and leave you more time for the better ones. The bad ones are the ones who claim the most of your time, never will be happy, always complaining and pay late.

And to be able to say NO is real freedom that most freelancers and entrepreneurs want.

It is also a 'luxury' that starters should want to achieve as fast as possible.
 
Absolutely. The other best thing I did when i was struggling was as you say, to increase my rate instead of decrease it.

From the moment I decided I would not and could not compete on price my career took off.
 
I charge 30% more than the client wants to pay. Which is always 20% less than they can afford to pay. Simple.
 
Publimix said:
Hi Nate,
The book contains 5 method to calculate your rate, that includes regio and experience, and the rates mentioned in the book are low-medium and high. So these are the market prices.
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You should tell me what my rate should be :-)

I'm genuinely curious now.

[edit: ok, rather than be insufferable about it, I'll type out my point. My guess is that rates for the sort of work I do when I'm fortunate, and the work I aspire to, here in Los Angeles would be both considered crazy and only possible in a city like LA, NYC, London, etc). It all comes down to what the client is. Some ad agency/prod co clients I work for, $40K/day for the shoot, $100K total for job is considered "no money". Rate is decent on those. On the other hand, tomorrow I do a $4k music vid for lunch money because the director is an established fashion stills photog and her work is amazing.

My point is and hopefully stated from another angle from my original post a week ago, rates are ALL over the place. From $300/day with a 5D to $3500-4K/day for A-list (hell, not even A-list get those rates many times) commercial DPs with zero gear that do not lift a finger. When I started doing bigger work, it was once a director, and another time a producer that said "you're too low". After those experiences I started asking around.]
 
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One thing I don't know that I've seen here is that despite all the "stick to your guns" stuff about rates, I know for a fact many people in town (Houston TX USA), no matter how established/experienced/how long they've been in the biz, will sometimes work for lower (sometimes much lower) than their normal rates. I know it happens. People do what they gotta do. Ideally you don't compromise, sometimes you do. If you want to say "I'm $1500 a day and you can suck my balls if you don't wanna pay that," and that works out for you, that's great, but just know there are experienced professionals in one of the largest cities in the US who don't even do that.
 
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