Same Brief, Two Clients, Two Prices: Why You Shouldn't Use a Rate Card

Two enquiries, one brief

An illustrator receives two emails on the same morning. A neighbourhood bakery wants six spot illustrations for its menu and window. A national grocery brand wants six spot illustrations for packaging that will sit on shelves in several hundred stores. The brief reads almost identically: six pieces, flat colour, three weeks.

If the illustrator quotes both from a rate card, the grocery brand gets a bargain and the bakery gets a price that may be a stretch, or they both get the same figure and one of them is overpaying relative to what they receive. Neither outcome is the result of a decision. It is just arithmetic on hours.

The idea behind this guide comes from Blair Enns's book Pricing Creativity, which argues that custom work should be priced for the client, not for the task. What follows is a practical version for a one-person business, built around the numbers from the day rate calculator.

Start with your floor

Using the calculator's worked example, a freelancer who wants 75,000 after tax needs a minimum of about 724 per day. Four days of illustration work therefore has a floor of roughly 2,900. That figure is the cheapest the illustrator should ever agree to for either client. It says nothing about what either project is worth.

Think of the floor as the bottom of a range. Everything above it is decided by the client, not by your hours.

What makes the same work worth more

Five things shift the value of a piece of work from one client to another. Reach: how many people will see it. Duration: how long it will be used. Exclusivity: whether competitors will be shut out. Risk: what a poor result would cost them. Urgency: how soon they need it and how hard the deadline is.

The bakery's illustrations reach a few hundred customers a week for a year or two, carry little risk and have a flexible deadline. The grocery packaging reaches a vast audience, will be on shelves for the length of a product cycle and has legal sign-off and a hard launch date. The grocery work is worth far more to them, which is a legitimate reason to charge more, even though the drawing time is the same.

A five-question intake

Before you name a figure, ask the client these questions, by email or on a short call. What is this for and where will it be used? How many people will see it, and for how long? What happens if it goes well, and what happens if it doesn't? Who else needs to approve it, and when is the real deadline? What range have you set aside for this?

You will rarely get all five answers, but even two or three change your quote. The budget question matters most: many clients will give a range if asked plainly, and a range tells you where to place the middle option of your proposal.

How to answer what do you charge for this

Resist replying with a number. The earlier you quote, the less you know and the lower the figure tends to be. A reply that works: that depends on how it will be used and what you are hoping to achieve. Could we spend fifteen minutes on that so I can give you a proposal that fits?

A client who will not spend fifteen minutes is telling you something useful. They are most likely comparing prices, and an unpaid proposal for them is likely to be wasted time.

When a standard price is fine

Not everything needs a bespoke quote. If you sell the same small service repeatedly, such as a fixed-size edit or a template customisation, a published price is efficient for both sides. The test is whether the value varies from client to client. Where it does, fix the product and price it openly. Where it does not, quote individually.

If you publish anything on your website, publish guidance rather than exact prices for custom work: something like projects usually start from a minimum figure. That discourages enquiries you could never serve profitably without committing you to a number for a job you have not yet scoped. A sensible minimum is a multiple of your floor, for example the cost of three or four billable days.

Putting it together

For the bakery, the illustrator might offer a lean option near the floor, a middle option with more variations and a print-ready pack, and a higher option with exclusive rights for several years. For the grocery brand, the same three options start higher because the usage rights and risk are larger. Same skill, same hours, different prices, each defensible to the person paying.

Pricing the client takes a little more work than reading from a list, but it is the difference between occasionally being well paid and being well paid on purpose.