payment

i can see myself geting yelled at for asking this here but i figured it's about building

anyway my friends seem to think i don't charge enough for private builds for people and i was wondering what other builders charge? do you go by how long the item took to make?, wether u create sculpts or textures for the item? types of permissions? any other things you would charge for?

pretty much just wondering, my stuff is mediocre compared to most but would be nice to see what others are getting paid

-Crunch

shop around and see for yourself.

Just higher you rates every time you have a client. Until people tell you it's to much. what you charge, than go a little bit lower again.

seel it for whatever you want... the lower your price (theoretically) the more customers you'll have (because it's a better value to them for what they're getting), the higher the price, the more you'll make off individual sales, but you may not get the same number of sales, it's all a tradeoff. personal experience is to set it where you feel comfortable, and then adjust it as you go along

I sell my services pretty cheap probably.. but maybe not.. all depends on the job. I have, so far, let the customer decide, and if it was too low an offer I would tell them that I can't do that much work for so little.. I have my bills too

But I've done work for anywhere between 1500 L$ to 40,000 L$, depending on the generosity, and complexity of the build.

If I had to build just a single, unfurnished house, it would be far less than if Iw as building a fully furnished apartment building made for 20 tenants, yaknow?

Here's an easy way to figure out what to charge. How much money do you want to make per year from your SL efforts? How many workable hours are there for you in a year? Divide the two, and there's your hourly rate.

Here are a couple of easy examples.

1. Let's say you're working part time in SL, just for some extra income. How much extra do you want? Let's say it's $10,000 a year. That's $200 a week. How many hours a week can you put into it? If it's 10 hours, then charge $20 per hour, or whatever the L$ equivalent of that is if you're working for L$.


2. Now let's say you're working full time, 40 hours per week. That means you've got 2000 working hours per year. How much do you want to make per year? $50,000? Well, then charge $25 per hour, or the L$ equivalent.


Both examples assume you're finding enough work to fill your hours. Since finding clients and closing sales with them for your services takes real time, and since it's conceivable that you won't always have as much work as you want (sometimes there's too much, sometimes not nearly enough; like anything else, it fluctuates), I'd suggest charging a bit more per hour than just what comes out of that simple math. But the math is enough for a good starting point.

So what you're saying here is that he should be charging somewhere in the neighborhood of 6200$L for something he knocks out in an hour. Good luck with that.

Hey, I only work for people who are serious, and who can afford to pay me what I'm worth. In the real world, digital artists get paid anywhere from $30 or $40 per hour at a minimum all the way up to several hundred dollars per hour. If you'd rather work for pennies, that's up to you. I won't.

You really think those of us who do this for a living are working for linden dollars? Please.

It's a little different if an item is intended to sit on a store shelf and be sold to the general public. It might sell for just a few dollars, or less, every time, but since you sell hundreds of the same item, it pays for itself. For custom work for hire, the client better be willing to understand that real time costs real money or they're not worth dealing with. Again, feel free to work for peanuts and crackerjacks if that's what floats your boat. Me, I've got real bills to pay.

If your quality of work is good enough, there are people who will pay that, and more.

I'll agree with Chosen. If it's something you'll sell again and again from a store shelf, a content creator can afford to keep prices low, knowing that over time their investment in effort will be rewarded with later sales. It might tale me a week to make a photorealistic custom texture set for building. But since I can probably sell at least one of those sets every week for the next year or more, I can keep the price low.

But for high-quality custom work? My prices for one-of-a-kind efforts with no later resale potential are based on how much of my time and effort it will take to accomplish the build. If I am spending several hours of my time solely to produce something that will only be bought once, by that one client, I have to balance that out against what I could be earning if I were to spend that time making my usual resellable merchandise.

My best advice to someone starting out on is to compare your work to other similar products, and compare the quality and features of those other items to yours.

Is your work about on a par with the average quality you're seeing? Then charge what they charge, if that gives you a return that you feel is worth your efforts.

Is your work better? Worse? More features? Fewer? Adjust your pricing accordingly.

With any product offering, there are two main factors that affect price points. That is return on an individual sale, and volume of sales at that price. As price goes up, you'll lose some sales from people that won't pay that high a price. But the higher price that you do get from those still willing to pay what you ask may well offset that. Go too high, and you start dropping in overall profits.

But it is also possible to price things too low. The Lilt hair coloring product is a good example of that in RL. When they first came out, they priced it really cheap, because their own materials and production costs weren't all that high. comparable items were at least ten to twenty times as expensive. No one bought Lilt, because they percieved that nothing that cheap could possibly be any good. When the makers raised the price, people tried it, and saw it was a very good product. They soon were charging more than some of the competition was, and getting it, because they were better.