Y’all, we need to have a talk about what it means to be a business. A thread.

You can call yourself a freelancer, a keyframe sniper, a contractor, or whatever else you want. You are a business.

Let’s break down a $10k budget for a 1-minute animation and why this is NOT a lot when you take into account all the factors.

Right off the bat, 30% goes to taxes. If you’re playing smart, another $20% to “profit” to save for a rainy day. The remaining $5,000 is for production.

We’ve got $5k to use. Let’s say you need an illustrator to do boards and designs. At $500/day, it takes 4-days. That’s $2k gone. We’ve got $3k left for animation.

You’ve got a few options. Animate it yourself, outsource it, or both.

Let’s say you’re super busy and you need to outsource this project. The project turns out great, but it took the animator 10 days at $500/day. That’s $5k. But we only had $3k left. What do we do? Well, this time it was from scope creep so we can charge the client. But...

What if it was on us? We just didn’t manage the project correctly, under estimated, or anything like that. We then have to eat into the $2k of profit that we had. That’s it’s. The project is budget is gone.

Now, technically you can write off what you paid the contractors you hired so that $3k you had for taxes can be your profit. But that’s not always the case and should never be consider apart of your profit.

We’re just doing simple maths here, too. This isn’t taking into account all the other expenses we have; software, hardware depreciation, etc. and all that maths that goes into pricing.

When you see a post that someone charges a ballpark $10k for a minute long explainer, stop saying “there’s no way I could charge that to my clients.” Wrong. You’re hurting other businesses by not charging appropriate rates. $10k goes super fast.

The asterisk is, if you’re going to play ball w/ pricing, you better be ready to deliver. If you can’t, don’t be a business. Find a job. There is no shame in having a job. Starting a business isn’t for everyone despite the loud minority yelling “Go freelance! Start a business!”