Quoting and Billing Methods

We offer you this brief summary of what we consider when preparing quotes for your projects. Hopefully it will help you understand why we charge what we do. Sometimes we cannot meet the price you were expecting, no matter how much we'd love to do the project.

Time

The first thing we think about when talking to you about any project are all the tasks involved and how long they will take to complete. The longer a job will take to complete, the more it will cost. The value of our working time is fairly consistent. So no matter what type of work is being performed, there needs to be a reasonable charge.

Overtime

If your project becomes much more involved than expected, we will respond in one of two ways. We may stop the work, and generate a new estimate to cover the additional work. But usually if a project has increased in scope, there is not time or desire to go through another approval process. In which case we will simply start charging additional fees, which are often higher than our normal rates, because we are performing work without the benefit of scheduling or foresight. This means your project may be interfering with other, planned projects, or be preventing us from obtaining new work. Your project is still as important to us as it always was. But now it would be taking up unknown valuable resources that we hadn’t budgeted for.

Value

There are two type of value we consider when quoting a job:

Worth

The worth of the finished piece is something to be considered. If it stands to generate a lot of response or revenue for a vitally important project, we will increase the charges. Likewise, this means we can charge relatively smaller amounts for meaningful, but low-yield projects.

Term of Use

If you finished artwork will be in use for a prolonged period of time, we will charge more than if it was just being use for a short, specific period. Logos for examples, cost more relative to the amount of time we take, partially because you will be receiving value from the logo for hopefully years to come.

Suppliers

Often your project will require us to hire outside companies, such as photographers and printers. unless we are positive that there is only one company that can do the job, we typically acquire estimates from several comparable suppliers and go with the best price. Because we are knowledgeable about the processes these suppliers use, we can find the best work and the most reasonable price. Occasionally we can even get them to cut our clients a special deal. But we never dictate prices, so we only have a limited amount of control. We only do business with people and companies we trust, so we always assume they are charging what is necessary to do the job the right way.

We also must keep in mind the amount of time it will take us to interact with these suppliers