Rate card generator

What belongs on a rate card

A rate card is a sales document, not a price list. Its job is to let somebody with a budget decide, without a call, that working with you is worth arranging. That means it has to answer the questions a brand asks in the first email, before they are asked: what do you make, what does it cost, when can you deliver, how many rounds of changes are included, and what may the brand do with the result.

Keep the services concrete. One thirty second vertical video with a clean file and one revision round is priceable. A content partnership is not. Name each thing you actually sell and write one line under it saying what the buyer receives. Then state what is outside the price, because the omissions cause more friction than the numbers do: raw footage, paid media usage, exclusivity, travel, product you are expected to buy.

What does not belong is anything that reads like a pitch deck. A brand does not need your origin story, a mood board, or a wall of screenshots on a rate card. Those can live on your site. The card should be readable in under a minute and forwardable to somebody who will never speak to you.

Whether to publish prices

Public prices do two useful things. They screen out brands whose budget was never going to reach you, which is most of the inbound that wastes a week. And they make you look settled, because a number that is written down reads as a number you have charged before.

The cost is flexibility. A published price is hard to exceed, and the same deliverable is genuinely worth more to a national retailer than to a founder shipping from a spare room. The usual compromise is to publish starting prices with a from label on anything open-ended, keep the packages fully priced because they are fixed scope, and quote custom work per deal. That keeps the filter without capping your ceiling.

Pricing a package against individual services

A package should cost less than buying the parts, and the gap should buy you something concrete. Published marketplace data shows bundles of three to four pieces commonly settling around 10 to 15 percent below the single-piece total, and larger bundles further under that. Use it as a shape rather than a rule.

Decide what the discount is in exchange for before you set it. Guaranteed volume is worth a real reduction because it removes the cost of finding the next deal. Payment up front is worth something. A longer usage window is not, and it is the most common thing a brand quietly folds into a package: three videos plus perpetual paid usage is not a bundle discount, it is a different product. Price the rights line separately inside the package so both sides can see it.

When a brand asks for a discount

Move the scope, not the rate. Offer two videos instead of three, thirty days of organic usage instead of ninety, one revision round instead of two, or drop the whitelisting. This gives the brand a genuine choice and keeps your published prices true, which matters because the number you accept once becomes the number that brand expects next time.

Say it plainly and without apology: here is what fits that budget. Most brands accept it, because their constraint is usually real and they would rather have less of your work than none of it. The creators who get squeezed are the ones who treat every request as a test of whether they want the job.

Rate card or custom quote

Send the card when the brand is early, comparing options, or asking what you charge. Send a quote when you know the deliverables, the usage and the timeline, because then a single tailored number closes faster than a menu. The card starts the conversation. The quote ends it.

Keep both current. An out-of-date card sent to a brand that then negotiates you up from an old number is worse than no card at all. When your rates change, change the card first, and keep it somewhere you control rather than in a PDF sitting in twenty inboxes.