How to bill rendering time?

[Speedster]

Hi all;

I've never seen this question posted before, and now that I'm deep into a clients animation program, I thought it was appropriate.  Any suggestions would be MOST welcome!

I'm trying to determine how to bill my clients for raw rendering time.  I usually just run renderings at my hourly designer rate, which is rather pricy.  But they usually take only seconds on my 64 core BOXX, so I nor my clients never give it a thought.

But for a rather large animation, I estimate it will take 8-12 hours overnight to render out the 500+ frames, maybe more for the final animation.  Obviously, I don't want to bill this at my hourly consulting rate.

I computed my ROI several years ago, and paid for my $13,000 BOXX in about six months due to increased productivity and value-added for my clients.  KeyShot + BOXX capability has brought me many new clients, I might add, mostly ad agencies.

I know some of you render animations as part of your design service, so hopefully you may have some billing ideas to share that would benefit all of us!

Thanks!!

Bill G

[Chad Holton]

Hi Bill,

I think your pricing should be similar to what render farms charge. Here's a good example: http://www.3dotp.com/pricing.html

Basically, they charge $1.33 a minute for 360 cores running @ 2.66 ghz.

You're running 32 threads @ 3.8 ghz, correct? If so, I did some calculations based on this information and come up with charging something around $.17 per minute (for less cores but greater speed).

There may be some other factors that come in to play that I'm not thinking of but hopefully it will be a good start for you.

Chad

[Speedster]

Good thoughts, Chad.  Thanks!  Interestingly, I had come up with $10 (US) an hour, which seems reasonable, and not an undue burden on the client. That's very close to your 17 cents a minute.
Bill G

[guest84672]

$1 per core per hour. In your case that is $32/h. Simple.

[Speedster]

Thanks, Thomas.  That's more realistic in my opinion, for a simple reason- renderings represent an important value for the client, and there's more than just the ROI, electricity, insurance and the like.  It also goes to the skill and experience of the renderer, which frankly has even greater value.  I see KeyShot as a "profit center", just like SolidWorks, Photoshop, FilterForge and all the other toys we use.  Individually, each is a profit center, but when combined they offer a powerful package, as we all know.

Bill G