Field Guides / Pricing
What to charge for video work: the pricing checklist
Price from your numbers, not your nerves. Six checks before your next number leaves your mouth.
The checklist
- Know your cost of a delivered day. Not your day rate, your cost: kit, insurance, software, your time across pre-production and post, overheads. If you don't know this number, every price you give is a guess.
- Never blurt a single number under pressure. When a warm prospect asks "roughly how much", give a real range and make scope the variable. A single number is a yes or a no. A range is a conversation.
- Use specific, non-round numbers. A quote of $12,850 reads like accounting. A quote of $12,000 reads like a guess with room in it. Specific numbers get negotiated less.
- Price the whole job, not just the shoot. The thinking, the planning, the project management and the revisions are work. If they're not priced, you're donating them.
- Structure the quote in four sections. Pre-production, production, post-production, and a production company fee. Most video businesses are missing at least one, and it's usually worth about 15% of the job.
- When the budget pushes back, drop scope, not price. The price holds. The deliverables flex.
The rule of thumb
If saying your price out loud makes you flinch, the problem is rarely the number. It's that you don't yet know the numbers underneath it. Start at item 1.
Go deeper
What to say when a prospect asks for a ballpark price · The pricing guide · Anatomy of a profitable quote