need your opinion - fix costs for renderings ?

[QuakeMarine1]

We at Rebus Renderfarm are rushed by the same question all day long "Whats the price if I send my print size still image to the farm?"
We never can answere that question for sure therefore I scratch my head the last days and it comes up an idea that might work.

What if:
You can define the render costs for your still image in advance ?
Imagen you like to render 3000 samples for maximal 10$. The farm eat your job until either 3000 samples are done OR farm stop with the highest possible samples for 10$.
You get the image and if the samples are still too low you can resume the render for additional X$ to get more samples (less image noise).

Since Vray 3.0 support Progressive rendering this idea could work well.

What do you think ?

[rjohnson33]

I think this would be very useful if you can implement stop and restart progressive rendering on the farm.

I'd be careful about how you word it though. If you offer a fixed cost for a print size still image customers may imagine that you're offering a 'noise free' finished result at a fixed price which wouldn't necessarily be the case (as far as I understand what you're saying).
I guess in that respect it still doesn't answer the question "what's the price if I send my print size still image to the farm" - it means you could get ongoing feedback on the progress that might allow you to stop a render sooner than you might have estimated using the fixed settings. It would also offer the advantage of access to a result at specific price (but still a result which may or may not be fit for your purposes).