Fair rate for creating Digital Signage

[Simon Roughan]

Hi Stacy,
I would stay away from flat rates. Perhaps one job demands much more complicated or intricate work than another.
I would charge an hourly rate. What you charge per hour depends on location, the competition, experience, software used, quality of your work etc etc. If youre 20 years old and living at Hotel Mumanddad, you would probably expect less than if youre 40 and paying off a house.

Good luck
Simon

[Stacy Obakpolor]

[Simon Roughan] “Hi Stacy,
I would stay away from flat rates. Perhaps one job demands much more complicated or intricate work than another.
I would charge an hourly rate. What you charge per hour depends on location, the competition, experience, software used, quality of your work etc etc. If youre 20 years old and living at Hotel Mumanddad, you would probably expect less than if youre 40 and paying off a house.

Good luck
Simon”

Thanks Simon! I appreciate the prompt response 🙂

[Matt Hall]

I agree with Simon. The agency will most likely want a budget number beyond the hourly rate. My typical approach is to provide an estimate based on a an assumed amount of hours it will take. For example:

The quote is $XXXX. This is based on an assumed time of X hours at $X per hour to produce (description of video content and tech specs).

It also may make sense for you to include the rounds of revisions that are included in your estimate. Speaking as someone who works at an agency, rounds of revisions can sometimes go on forever. Language you could use could be like this:

This estimate is based on 2 rounds of agency revisions plus 2 rounds of client revisions. Work beyond this will be additional and charged hourly.

Depending on the agency you are working with, you should also ask about payment terms – it is not uncommon for payments to take 4 months or longer to process. You might want to bill part up front and part at completion of the job.

[Richard Herd]

What is your deliverable?

Digital signage is weird. I’m not even sure how to begin. Basically, know your deliverable and your market. $250/deliverable is my rate. For digital signage is often a mograph background and a Scala template. The mograph is 1 deliverable. The Scala template is another. The vendor of the signage system (that I’m very familiar with) charges about double that rate because their deliverable delves into code banging and auto-executables in VBS. If you’re moving into VBS then you should charge more.