What creative work actually costs

Search for what a brand film costs and you will find nothing. Search for website pricing and you will find a page saying every project is different, followed by a contact form.

We do the same thing, so this is not a complaint about anyone else. Quoting a figure without a brief is how you end up doing the wrong work for the wrong money, and both sides lose. But the effect is that most people budget for creative work by asking someone what they paid once, which is roughly as reliable as it sounds.

So instead of a rate card, here is the thing that is actually useful: what moves the number, why quotes for the same request come back five times apart, and how to get a real answer in one conversation.

Why nobody publishes a price

Because the same three words describe wildly different jobs.

"A brand film" is one person talking to camera in an afternoon, or a two-day shoot with a crew, a location fee, a cast and a colourist. "A website" is five pages of considered copy, or a site with a content system, a booking flow and an integration into something your team already uses. "A brand" is a logo, or an identity system with a type licence, guidelines, and the templates that stop every department inventing their own version by Christmas.

Publish a starting price and you attract every enquiry that wants the cheapest version of the thing, then spend the first call explaining why the real number is four times higher. Nobody lied, everybody wasted an afternoon, and the person enquiring comes away feeling misled.

The honest version is to explain the variables instead. Then a first conversation is about scope rather than surprise.

The five things that move the number

These hold across all six disciplines. Strategy, imagery, film, design, web and social all price on the same underlying questions, which is why one studio can quote the lot without pretending each is a separate art.

1. How much has to be made from nothing

The biggest single factor, and the one most people underestimate.

A film with a script, a location confirmed and someone who can present costs a fraction of one where all three need finding. A website with the copy written is a build; a website without it is a build plus a writing job plus the three weeks of decisions that writing forces. A photography brief with a shot list is a day's work. The same brief without one is a day's work plus a discovery session plus, quite often, a second shoot.

If you want one lever to pull on budget, it is this. Not "make it cheaper". Get the source material further along before you commission.

2. How many outputs come off one build

The second lever, and where the largest savings actually live.

Most of the cost in visualisation is modelling and lighting. Once that exists, another camera position is a render rather than a project. Most of the cost in film is getting a crew and a subject into the same room. Once they are there, the extra cutdowns are edit time. Most of the cost in identity is the thinking. Once it is agreed, another application is an afternoon.

So the same list of assets costs wildly different amounts depending on whether it was commissioned together or one piece at a time across a year. Almost every expensive surprise traces back to somebody buying the same thing twice.

3. How many people have to be in a room

Anything with a shoot day is priced in people and days, not in the length of the finished thing.

A thirty second film and a three minute film shot on the same day cost nearly the same. A thirty second film needing a presenter, a crew of four, a sound recordist, a stylist and a location fee is a different order of thing entirely, and the runtime has nothing to do with it.

This is where a brief can be reshaped hardest, because very often what the film has to achieve does not actually require the cast.

4. How many rounds of change are in the scope

Every quote assumes a number of amend rounds, usually two. Most overruns are not the studio moving the goalposts. They are a third and fourth round caused by someone senior seeing the work for the first time at round three.

You control this entirely and it costs you nothing. Name one approver before the work starts, and get everyone whose opinion will carry weight into the first review rather than the last. It is the cheapest saving available anywhere in the process and the one most often skipped.

5. Whether it is one job or a programme

A studio prices a single commission for the risk of a single commission, including the ramp up of learning your business, your market, your files and your approval chain.

Across a programme that happens once. The identity built for the first campaign applies to the second. The templates, the grid, the file naming, the tone of voice document. Three projects on a retainer cost meaningfully less each than three bought separately, and the gap widens with every one after that.

This is why studios push retainers, and it is fair to be sceptical about that. The test is whether they can tell you specifically what gets reused. If they cannot, it is a subscription rather than a programme.

The question behind the question

When someone asks what a piece of work costs, they usually mean one of three things, and the useful answer is different each time.

Can I afford to start? Then the answer is a smallest useful version, not a number. There is nearly always a real piece of work at the bottom of the range that is worth having on its own.

Am I being quoted fairly? Then the answer is what drives the price, so you can see whether the quote reflects the job. That is most of this article.

How do I get this signed off? Then you need a range, a scope and the sentence explaining what it does commercially. Ask for that directly. Any studio worth using would rather write it than lose the project to a finance meeting it never attended.

How to compare quotes that are not comparable

Get three quotes for a website and they will come back three, seven and fifteen. That is not a spread. They are three different jobs, and the cheapest is usually the one that answered a smaller question.

Five things to normalise before you compare anything.

The deliverables, itemised. Not "a brand identity" but what arrives: which marks, which files, which applications, whether guidelines are included or extra.

The rounds. Two is standard. A quote that does not say is a quote that will grow.

Who owns the result. Design and photography follow the same rules: unless copyright is assigned in writing, the studio that made it still owns it, and having the files is not the same as having the rights. We wrote about how that works.

What you can do without them afterwards. Can your team edit the site, run the templates, recolour the mark for a one-off. Or does every small change come back as a job.

What happens on the day it goes wrong. Who fixes a broken page at five o'clock on a Friday, and is that inside the number.

A cheap quote that fails four of those is not cheap. It is a deposit on a second project.

Where the money actually goes missing

Rarely on expensive suppliers. Almost always on these four, roughly in this order.

Commissioning in the wrong order. Photography booked before anyone agreed what the audience has to believe. A site built before the proposition was settled. The expensive things depend on the cheap things, and the cheap things are the ones that get skipped for time.

Buying assets that only work in one place. A hero image that does not crop square. A landscape film that cannot be cut vertical. A logo that fails at signage scale. Deciding the output list before anything is made costs nothing and prevents most of it.

Paying twice for the same day. Three suppliers on site in the same month, none of whom knew about the others.

Buying the cheapest version of the thing carrying the most weight. Some assets are seen once. Some are seen by every customer before they decide. Spending evenly across both is the most common budgeting mistake there is, and it is nearly always the one doing the heavy lifting that got value engineered.

How to get a real number in one conversation

You do not need a finished brief. You need five facts.

What you are trying to change, commercially. When it has to be live. What already exists, honestly, including whether the copy is written. Every place the work has to appear. And who signs it off.

Any studio that cannot give you a shaped range from those five is either not listening or has not done it often enough.

Why we quote against a brief

We do not publish a rate card, and this article is the version of one we can write honestly.

What we publish instead is the shape of an engagement. Glow is one thing done properly, with a fixed scope agreed before we start. Beam is a campaign with legs, planned together so nothing gets made twice. Halo is the whole picture on a retainer. Those describe how much of the studio is engaged, not a price, because the same tier costs different amounts for different jobs and pretending otherwise would just be a rate card with extra steps.

We will also tell you when a smaller piece of work would do. That costs us money occasionally and saves it more often, and it is the only version of this conversation worth having twice.

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Tell us what you are trying to change, when it has to be live and what already exists. We will come back with what we would make and what it costs.