I desagree with you Bobby, if you work hard and you are faster on top of that you probably invested in hardware to even have faster rendertimes why you should charge less… If you work fast doesn’t mean that you hour cost less or even the same than the guy who is average in speed..you have to be more expensive in my opinion… the benefit is in your favor as well as you client because he get quality faster.
If you think in that way you are under value your work yourself more than your client and losing confident to charge what you have yo charge.
totally agree with Flino2004, the speed need to be awarded by money every time, saving time is always the target for all clients and us. so @ the end saving time save money for your client but to save money after he needs to pay more before eheheh…
What was once hard and slow becomes easy and fast, once you get good. You can’t charge more because you are slow. Mechanic use a book to quote prices. If the mechanic is fast they make money, but if they are slow, they’ll loose money. If I hired an inexperienced mechanic to change my starter and it took him 4x as long, why should I pay for his inexperience?
I guess that was my point 
This issue of price vs speed is one that comes up a lot in various ways. I think the only sensible answer is to price your work by the hour. If a job takes you 1/2 the time it used to take, then it makes sense to charge something like 1/2 what you used to charge. Your rate should already be accounting for hardware and software update costs - if it’s not then your rate was problematic to begin with.
There is a constant tension between a sense of what a job is “worth” versus the time required for you to do it. There is a pressure from clients to drive prices down, but that’s *always* been the case: they just didn’t have as many options in the past. There is also a sense of investment/entitlement for us artists that says “why should I do the same job for less?” It’s hard to adjust to, but the reality is that we have to adapt our price to be in relation to the work done and the demand. A job that takes less time now simply is not the same job. It *is* worth less, in my opinion anyway.
In any case, I strongly believe in tying my job rates as strictly as possible to time. That’s the only way I have found to make consistent sense from job to job, and as the market and my ability to produce work evolves. (or de-volves 
) YMMV.
/b
the more experience you have, the more you should make, in theory. You can do jobs faster and better, which means, on to the next job. I simple look at a job and calculate how many days it’ll take me to do it. I usually charge 300.00 a day and anything less isn’t worth my time.
Hmmm so if I charge 290.00
I guess some people charge this amount in Yens
The problem we are experiencing presently is clients changing the completion date. If we quote for a project and factor it in for 3 weeks (for example) that the client has originally requested - it is achievable but, when they start allowing the project to extend past the originally agreed deadline then it beings to affect us. We are currently looking at ways to avoid this but it has been a problem last year and beginning to happen again this year.
I might be misinterpreting your point Brett, but I strongly disagree with the notion that if something takes you less time, it’s worth less.
I do agree that time is the only way to consistantly quote, but if a task takes you less time due to investment in your skills/staff/set-up then your rates should increase to reflect that. Granted, I am talking skilled tasks here (modelling, texturing, re-touching) not technical speed increases, such as rendering…
Extrapolating your idea at it’s most basic level - those that are faster & more efficient at their jobs would end up earning the same amount as those that are not.
I’m with you on that. if you are faster at your job (ie better) you get to make more money.
I think you might be misunderstanding me, but I’m not sure. If I read you correctly your first two points are actually kinda contradictory: if something takes less time, but is not worth less then you are not seeing time as a consistent way to quote, at least not in a way that makes sense to me?
Perhaps the confusion is this: when I say a job that takes less time should cost less, I am not saying your *rate* should be lower, only that you should charge for the amount of time you put in. This is relative to your *own* time and rate to do the work, not to someone else. Someone else who is less skilled will take more time, but it is very unlikely they are charging the same hourly/daily rate. They *should* be cheaper than you - but by the hour is how you would measure it (or by the day- whatever unit of time you like to bill by) not by the ‘job’.
To simplify: you set your rate to reflect your perceived and actual value (your skills, the overhead of software, hardware, staff, training time, rent etc, etc.) Then you charge by the hour to work. If a job last year took me 2 days and this year takes me one day then I would charge 1/2 the money this year (assuming it’s all labour for the sake of the point) - but by the hour I’m still making the same (also assuming my rate hasn’t changed for other reasons).
I find this can be hard to swallow at times, because it *feels* like I’m working for less, but that’s just instinctive thinking about the value of a job without thinking about how that value got there in the first place. When I really think about the cost of the job it sits just fine.
Because so many factors can change from job to job, and it’s so hard to track variables I find it simplest just to go by the hours in and make sure I’m comfortable with my hourly rate. This way I don’t have to worry about what a job *might* be worth to someone else or at some other time in any kind of abstract way. It’s all very concrete and easy to measure.
Make better sense now, or am I still off base?
/b
We still use time as a constant factor but as our service improves, we adjust our daily/hourly rate accordingly - this is across the board mind, we don’t change our rates on a per job basis. For example, we currently charge approx 35-40% more than we did say 3 years ago.
If we didn’t do this then we’d be increasing our workload but always earning exactly the same.
Does that make sense?
Totally. They are two very different factors: hourly rates, and how much you actually charge per job based on the hours in. It gets confusing when they get mixed up inappropriately. I was originally just speaking about the latter and taking the former as a given. I think we are on the same page.
As a side note, I wish I could say the same about rates: my rates are lower now than they have been in a very long time. Market pressures being what they are… That’s for retouching though - CG rates are stable.
Hmm - I think really what drives this is market forces not what we want to be paid. If we get faster then we can charge more and get more clients - do more work in the same time and make more. If it is worth $500 a view to a client to have renderings done - then we can figure if that will take us 10 hours or 3 hours or 30 hours. You can spend 50 hours on a building but if its not worth it to the client you are wasting your time.