The two numbers: your daily output and your day rate
You cannot trade without both. Most artists have never measured either - and it costs them every single job.
12 minute read · one activity · lesson 18 of 21
The book's pre-flight checklist has eight items, and two of them are numbers: you know how many frames you can output in a day, and you know how much you charge. Without both, you are not a business. You are a person hoping.
Number one: your output
You measured this on Day 4 - frames per day at line, at tone, at colour. That number IS your product. Everything you quote is derived from it.
Know your snags, too. The book's own weakness is large crowds, and he builds the delay into the schedule rather than pretending it will not happen. Find yours and price them.
Number two: your rate
The market responds to your rate. Too high and you do not get booked. Too low and you undercut your own revenue - and, worse, you have told the market what you think you are worth.
Then the rules that make a rate hold:
- Your rate is the SAME for every client, regardless of size. A commercial for a global brand and a commercial for a regional one have broadly similar per-day budgets for a storyboard artist. Think in terms of industry-standard fees, not brand notoriety.
- Never quote a naked price. Quote rate AND output, together, with an example attached: this many frames, at this level, for this fee.
- Overtime: charge nothing for the first hour, then +25%.
- Weekends: +50%.
- Offer HALF DAYS so you do not miss out on smaller jobs.
- For small jobs, price per frame - your day rate divided by your daily output.
- Consider a booking fee, so a client cannot waste your calendar for free.
How to find your number, honestly
The book suggests contacting rival artists posing as a producer to extract their rate and output, repeating it five times to find a median.
I would not do that, and you do not need to. Deception of a fellow freelancer is a poor foundation for a career in an industry that runs on word of mouth - and it is unnecessary, because the honest routes work: published rate cards from guilds and unions, freelancer rate surveys, the rates advertised openly on Behance and Upwork, and - best of all - simply asking peers what they charge. Artists talk more openly about money than they used to, and the ones who share are the ones worth knowing.
What you SHOULD take from his method is the shape of it: gather five real data points, compare each against the OUTPUT it buys, and set your median from there. A rate without an output attached is meaningless.
The figures in the book, dated honestly
He quotes £450/day in his own email template, and $200–1500/day as the range a developing artist can grow into. Both are pre-2023 figures from one artist in one market (UK advertising).
Use them as a sense of the shape of the ladder - not as your price. Rates move, currencies move, and markets differ enormously. Do the survey.
“If your rate is too high, you shall not be accepted for the role prospected. If your rate is too low you shall undercut your own potential revenue.”
- Mitchell James Hughes, Storyboard Art
A note on this one
Two health warnings on this lesson. (1) The rates quoted in the book (£450/day; $200–1500/day) are the author's own, pre-2023, from UK advertising - treat them as a shape, not a price, and survey your own market. (2) The book suggests posing as a producer to extract a rival's rate. We do not teach that: it is a deception of a colleague in an industry that runs on word of mouth, and the honest routes - guild rate cards, rate surveys, open peer conversation - get you the same five data points without the cost.
Build your rate card
At the end of this you will have a price list. Not a feeling - a list, with numbers on it, that you can send.
- Write your three output numbers from Day 4: frames/day at line, tone, colour.
- Gather FIVE honest market data points for your level and market. Published rate cards, rate surveys, open peer conversation, publicly-listed freelancer rates. Write down the rate AND the output each one buys.
- Take the median. That is your starting day rate.
- Now build the card: day rate; half-day rate; per-frame rate (day rate ÷ output) at each of the three levels; overtime (+25% after the first hour); weekend (+50%); shot-list creation as a standalone service (Day 15).
- Finally, write your rate in a sentence you can say out loud without your voice going up at the end: 'My day rate is ___, for which you can expect ___ frames at ___ level.'
What you should have at the end
A one-page rate card. Print it. The first time a producer asks 'what's your rate?' you will read it off a page instead of inventing a number under pressure - which is how people end up working a fortnight for free.
Day 18 in one line
Output and rate. Measure the first, survey the second, and never quote one without the other.
This course is free and stays free. If you want to board in the suite Mitchell James Hughes built for his own work - script, shot list, storyboard, animatic, AI artist - the free tier opens every app with no card.
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