MrQwest

Costing small jobs...

5 February 10

… and educating the client.

Just because you’re producing some album art for a CD or a flyer for a club night, does not mean you get paid £50 or so because it’s a small piece of work.

I have a friend who used to ask me to knock him up a flyer for £20 for a club night he was promoting. I used to say to him that it takes more than half an hour to design a flyer; sometimes it’d take 3 or 4 hours. Work this out at roughly £30 p/hour and you’re looking at £100.

On top of that, you’ll have to factor in time to get the flyer proof-read & approved & you’re up to £125-£150 easy. Some people charge more than that for a flyer design.

But for jobs this sort of size, it’s silly to price on a ‘per hour’ basis. You may get a flit of inspiration and finish something in half hour. Would you charge your client £15 for said project? I wouldn’t.

On the flip side of the coin, you may make up an iteration and then your client doesn’t like it & asks for some changes or worse still, to start again! You could spend (for example) 10 hours on your design, proof, re-design, proof, changes, proof, more change & approval. That equates to £300 for a flyer at the £30 p/hour rate we spoke of earlier.

So for jobs like this, I like to quote a flat fee (dependant on what the client wants).

But I tend to work on the notion that I’d much rather quote a flat fee for 90% of the bigger jobs I do! I’d rather not say to a client “I charge £30 an hour but I can’t really tell you how long it’ll take to design your website, so I hope your budget is flexible”. I’d much rather say “My estimate for the project is £1500 (for example) and I don’t expect it to rise above this figure however the final payment will not be above £1750”. The extra £250 on the end being there as a contingency to cover additional variations to the project.

Of course, there’s the other projects that I’m involved with that are on-going maintenance contracts. The work flow on these projects vary wildly from year to year so it’s obvious that in this case, you can’t put a flat annual fee for this work & this is where a per-hour fee will come in!

How do you work out your costings?