Hey all, so I wanted to ask the fellow devs of the platform that tend to do commission work how you go about being more firm with your prices?
I’m a UI Designer mainly and I’m a very lenient and soft person so I find it difficult to charge high prices for my work. I’ve been told by various friends and colleagues that I undercharge for my work but I feel bad when clients think I’m asking for too much so I just accept their offer as it also expands my portfolio.
I don’t script my UI so that’s obviously a reason to charge less, however, I always do my best to give the highest quality product for my clients and something that adheres to their brief yet.
This is a very important question. You’re right to be thinking about this, because feeling pressured to lowball the value of your labour can lead to unhealthy or exploitative relationships with the people you end up working for.
The big thing is to be okay with ‘no’. If nobody ever says ‘no’ to your price, you should be thinking about whether you’re providing something far too cheaply.
So, define a target audience who you want to cater to, and tailor your offerings so that they’ll say ‘yes’, and tune out everyone else - they’re a bonus, but not the core of your focus.
You should figure out what your minimum rate is. Take a look at your expenses (including investing in yourself and your tools, not just how much you pay for electricity every month). How much expense do you incur per hour you work for someone? You don’t need a 100% accurate-to-life number, but you need to decide on one you think makes sense.
You can sometimes reverse-engineer how much you instinctively think your time is worth, by figuring out what the limit of your spending habits are, and correlating that with time-based metrics:
I spent 30 USD on a plugin that I use about 4 times a week, which saves me 5 minutes of work. I’m saving 20 minutes a week, or 2.86 minutes a day.
I want to recoup the cost in 1 month, so I’ll need to recoup the cost in 30 days.
That means I will earn back 30 USD from 30 days of using a plugin for 2.86 minutes every day, aka I will earn back 1 USD from 1 day of using that plugin for 2.86 minutes
So you will earn 1 USD per 2.86 minutes, which multiplies up to roughly 21 USD per hour.
More rigorously, you can look to professionally calculated metrics like living wages to determine the same thing.
Coincidentally, agreeing with the above “non-rigorous” calculation:
As of 2023, the living wage for a single person without any family generally falls within the range of $15 to $20 per hour across many parts of the U.S.
Once you know your minimum rate, do not ever negotiate below it. That’s your hard line.
Then, use the number of 'no’s to tell you whether your products are truly worth the price. But crucially, don’t take ‘no’ to mean you should lower your price. Instead, use it as a signal to improve and try new things.
So long as your price is derived from real world values, you should eventually find something which enough people (not all people!) want to say ‘yes’ to, at the price point that works for you, because if that willingness to buy stuff didn’t exist in the world, then everyone would go out of business.
I usually ask the client their budget and then just do their work in 70% of their budget. If their budget goes too low then I just leave. As a GUI designer, I would suggest you take money depending on the quality of your GUI’s. But a rough price would be around 20-60 dollars per design. Or in robux, 1.6k-4.8k.
Thank you very much for this, that’s helped a lot. My main argument to anyone uninterested in my higher prices was that ROBLOX dev ex rates aren’t the best, many clients seem to believe that $20 worth of Robux from the store is the same as paying a commissioner $20 when it isn’t. For instance, if I was paid 1k Robux that’s literally $1.50 for me. You’re totally correct on applying real-world expenses though. Commissions simply put, are a job so they should be a means of income and if the price you set doesn’t fulfill the task of providing an income then what’s the point?
I’ll definitely reflect from this so once again, thank you!
See, scripted gui pretty much is worse than raw gui, as usually code doesn’t fit, at least if you are more experienced programmer, you have your own styl,e soo no difference if this gui is scripted or not
Payment is another thing, see commisions are not profitable soo people charge some cash for them, 1000 - 2000 robux for gui is not that bad, the truth is that most devs are lazy soo they can’t make gui themselves, or they can’t draw vectors.
Don’t take your prize as only your work, take your prize as your time, as your engagement, and your client’s time
People sees Gui as asset, there is script&asset, but they don’t see inside, this inside matters
Agreed. There’s a reason why some devs seek UI designers as they can’t do it themself, so if someone is looking for your talents why take a low price for doing their work; you’re clearly in demand.