Your hourly and project rates - Care to divulge?

Anagoge

Senior Member
In general, it's clear that the design industry doesn't like to talk about prices. We tend to keep prices and cost of things quiet until it's asked of us. Obviously there is a time before any signing of a contract when a price must be discussed, but on websites and promotional work and perhaps even initial emails, we always omit them.

I believe this is why so many students who are finishing their University courses always ask the same thing - "How much do I charge?". The fact is, University only equips a designer to learn, it doesn't tell them how to do business and my own prices and practices are through trial and error.

So, with that in mind, who is forthcoming enough to divulge their pricing plans? How much do you charge hourly? Which projects get charged overall instead of hourly? Do you charge based on how big the client is or do you charge based solely on the level of work? What do you charge for a logo? A complete stationery package? A 20 page website? etc. It'd be really interesting to see what we all charge.

I think there may be some reluctance to answer these questions so I'll go first.

My own rate is £15/hour.
I charge based on my time and skill and never charge more/less based on how big the client is - it's always based on the work.
I charge £360 for a logo design with three options to choose from and 3 rounds of revision.
I charge £320 for a stationery package with three options and 3 rounds of revision.

Just some examples. Care to follow with yours?
 
I too am really intrigued with peoples hourly rates etc (as im sure we all are) Everyone wants to know if they could get away with charging a bit more, of if its time to drop their quotes down to get more work, but I guess the problem we all face is that we work in such a competitive, dog eat dog industry, why would you want to reveal your inner business secrets to your potential rivals?

However, it is almost impossible for newbies and students to know where to begin, and yeh, trial and error plays its part, but often people have no idea where to even begin. Would it be possible for DF to organise a poll or a questionnaire that all the members could fill in anonymously,then that way we can be as honest as we want and build up an idea of peoples costs compared to their experience, type of work, size of client etc. Is that possible?
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Im a newbie and I just charge £15 an hour. I would obviously like to charge more but I dont think I can at the moment because of lack of experience.

I havent had too many projects to put a set price on anything so £15 an hour is what I charge for everything.
 
As a freelancer my usual fee is £250 per day, or £300 if using my own equipment/facilities. Often though a client will have a budget of X, in which case it's agreed up front what can and can't be achieved with X amount. Obviously the really exciting, interesting jobs/clients get much more for their money as I'm generally more inclined to put the extra time in for free. Sometimes though, you need to be aware of how much it's worth to the client, and not how much it costs you. Something which is easy and takes me a few hours to do can be charged at what seems like an extortionate amount. This is because the I'm literally the only person that can do it if I created all the project files, invested financially in all the equipment and training and knowledge. Things like un-archiving and re-opening complex animation projects you did last year to reversion it in a different language.
 
I charge based on my experience and skill. I'm primarily a Web Designer so I only charge £200 for a logo design incl. 3 revisions.

For a full website excluding logo (Design and layout, XHTML/CSS coding and Wordpress implementation) I charge a basic fee of £1200 incl. 3 revisions. If the client needs additional functionalities like jQuery sliders/galleries and so on, I charge extra for that depending on the complexity.
 
Aarlev said:
I charge based on my experience and skill. I'm primarily a Web Designer so I only charge £200 for a logo design incl. 3 revisions.

For a full website excluding logo (Design and layout, XHTML/CSS coding and Wordpress implementation) I charge a basic fee of £1200 incl. 3 revisions. If the client needs additional functionalities like jQuery sliders/galleries and so on, I charge extra for that depending on the complexity.

What size site is this generally for? And including any content suggestions / changes?
 
I'm not going to say prices but what I do is charge what I feel is a fair price for my services, I know of people charging up to £100 per hour for CAD services, I feel thats a little on the high side for my field of work so I charge a lesser price.

As with all work you have to charge on skills and experience but I also take into account local competition. Say for example I was to do some local (I cover all over the place) graphic design work which isn't my primary source of work, I wouldn't charge as much for that as I would for my CAD work purely due to their being more competition in my area and generally speaking for me it's less time consuming than my CAD work. You've also got time spent travelling to see clients, one of my clients is 3 hours each way to go have a meeting so I lose a complete day away from the office.

I also take into account rendering time, depending on what I'm doing I can lose 1 or all my computers to this task meaning I can't take on any other work (I've only got so many power sockets :)) so the prices are set accordingly.
 
Renniks said:
What size site is this generally for? And including any content suggestions / changes?

Small to medium sized site. Although it's not so much the size or amount of pages that matters to me as coding the site will be the same basically. It's more stuff like jQuery functionality, Shopping carts, search facilities etc. that adds to the complexity and build time.

It's Including revisions in design stage only. Any changes after signoff I charge for. I don't make suggestions for content (apart from the presentation of it of course) and I don't start anything before the client has supplied all assets and written content for the static pages. Training in using WP is of course also included in the price.
 
I did a music video at The Mill a while ago. Flame operators there cost around £1000 an hour if you pay full rate-card prices!
 
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