Why do clients looking for creative work offe...

ian_bonner · ‎04-26-2018

Why do clients looking for creative work offer so little in terms of budget? I am from the UK and have seen jobs on here for $10! And the attached description makes out that the designer should be happy and grateful for what is being offered! Even $1-200 dollars is still cheap for a branding project!

I have been in graphic design for over 20 years but people want something for nothing nowadays and it seems to be worse than ever right now. I have worked for some large global companies and I have never felt so undervalued as I do now. I think clients need to take a look at themselves and question if they would be happy working for the same fees and sell their soul. Id guess they wouldnt!

I usually ask at least £600 (approx $830) for a brand identity. The work and time that goes into such a project is far more than most people imagine and that comes across in the budgets posted by clients. I can understand the need to drop in our fees by using freelance sites and thats fine, but TEN DOLLARS?!!

Does anyone else feel a bit undervalued here or is it just me?!

prestonhunter · ‎04-26-2018

Clients should pay what they need to pay in order to obtain the results they need.

I can assure you that many clients pay more than $10 (or $200) for brand identity work. Many companies pay tens of thousands or more for such work.

Those clients are paying to get higher quality, more exhaustive work.

Why should a client pay more for something that he can obtain for $10? That is not something you do when you walk into a store and buy a $10 item.

ian_bonner · ‎04-27-2018

Im sorry but I completely disagree Preston. Clients should pay the going fees, not what they feel its worth. By allowing this to happen people can call themselves graphic designers and give clients sub-standard work with no real knowledge of what they are doing.

You use the analogy of walking into a store and not paying more than something they can obtain for more than $10. Well heres my analogy. If you cant pay the value that something is worth then you dont get to buy it. Id like a new TV but I dont go into a store and offer £5 because thats what I can afford. I just know i cant afford it and accept that.

Do you question the price of a product in a shop eveytime and then haggle over its price? And do you believe that a client would be happy with their service/products being so vastly undervalued? We arent talking a 10-15% decrease in fees here. This is HUGE.

$200 for brand identity is extremely low. Let me break that down for you. That is £145 GBP for a brand identity. I work an 8.5 hour day and if you ask any grapic designer a week would be the very minimum estimated time to complete a corporate identity to a high standard. To complete the project using these figures amounts to £2.43p PER HOUR. The legal minimum wage in the UK is £7.83 per hour.

Do you think that is fair?

nahidrajbd · ‎04-26-2018

I am also a designer. Sometime clients ask for huge and special skill job for nearly free.

For branding project $10 is really funny. But the thing is you can find some funny guy with funny cover letter on this kind of posting.

ian_bonner · ‎04-27-2018

Nahid they do not realise the work that goes into creating a logo and brand identity. They think its just a matter of throwing it together. The sad thing is there is no assistance for designers and these clients are allowed to offer a pittance becaus it is believed to be ok as they are saving money for the clients. Who stands up for the creatives by saying that we are being undervalued?

If you go into a garage and have your brakes changed then you pay what is asked but these clients are allowed to undervalue what we do and no one supports the fact that we need support to get close to what we are worth.

petra_r · ‎04-28-2018

@Ian B wrote:
Nahid they do not realise the work that goes into creating a logo and brand identity. They think its just a matter of throwing it together.

Ian, you can thank people like Nahid who are doing those jobs at 2 or 3 Dollars an hour cheerfully.

Basically you need to learn to cherry-pick. Leave the cheap clients to those who want to work for next to nothing and give the clients essentially what they pay for, and concentrate only on those clients who want to also get what they pay for, at the other end of the spectrum.

The other thing you absolutely must do is put a portfolio on your profile. When I hire creatives the first (and almost only) thing I look at is their portfolio.

If they haven't got one on their Upwork profile, I immediately move on.

Ian B wrote:. To complete the project using these figures amounts to £2.43p PER HOUR. The legal minimum wage in the UK is £7.83 per hour.

Do you think that is fair?

It doesn't matter what I consider "fair."

It also does not matter what the "minimum wage" in the UK is. There is no such thing as "wage" (minimum or otherwise) in freelancing.

It also does not matter that in some countries with lots of freelancers the minimum wage is less than $ 0.20 an hour.

Everything is worth what one party is prepared to pay and the other is prepared to accept.

chazgossmedia · ‎06-06-2018

Ian, I create whiteboard videos and I run into the same problem. You can look at 6 pages of job postings and see 1 or 2 that would even be reasonable to waste my time writing up a proposal? Then in their posting they ask 15 questions, 6 of which are just the first 3 asked different ways. Its very much a "Creative" projects problem on Upwork. Not Upworks fault. But the clients that come here are very much a Fiverr crowd, looking for cheap work with unreasonable deadlines. What I've started doing is, depending on the "connects" you want to use, bid the jobs at what you want to get paid and make sure your proposal includes your terms. They want the work done by you, then make them do it your way. And most will condescend to you, but you will find a few nice, cordial people. Its a numbers game here. Put out a large amount of quality proposals and if you get back a few responses that agree to your terms, there you go.

ehsrost · ‎04-27-2018

If I were such kind of client I would be willing to loose $10 just to see what one can do for that price. Maybe collecting ideas?

silw · ‎04-27-2018

You are hurting your own business so massively if you are charging projects on "how many hours i need to work" instead of the value, importance, scale and potential ROI for the given project.

I don't see much difference between 10, 200 or 800$ for brand identity,

all of those numbers are super low.

Keep in mind there is a reason for a company to go to upwork instead calling a design agency in their country:

1) they don't have the budget to effort a normal prizing

There are clients with normal budgets, normal expectations and all in all professional attitudes, but 99% of those aren't on upwork.

To use Upwork as a side-project to get some of those nice clients every now and then seems perfect to me. To base your entire existance on this platform probably is a bad idea, since companies with money USUALLY don't have an advantage by hiring someone on Upwork instead of hiring directly on instagram,behance or in RL.

vastianzzz · ‎05-02-2018

I think the root if the matter lies in there being people who's willing to work for such wages. When you go into the internet to work on a certain field, you need to have in mind that you'll be competing against people from places where what to you might be the price of lunch, to them might be an entire month's rent. That's on the area of competitors, then if you look at who's hiring, people will prefer to pay the smallest amount possible for whoever can do the job they need to get done. And a big part of that is clients in general having 0 knowledge of what they're doing. You as a designer might know how important brand identity is. But the people putting the money down will often not know, or simply not care about this.

So seeing people request such demented things as designing a company logo for 10 buckos is a sad reality we must live with. But hey, just like others have said in their replies, it's a matter of picking the right client. If you're a designer with experience, I doubt you want to be anywhere near somebody thinking of only spending $10 on a vital asset for the company their trying to get going.

To answer your question, I think most designers will feel a bit udnervaluated upon seeing such requests. But I wouldn't take it personally. You want to focus on working with serious people, who can bother to look up how much they should be investing.

silw · ‎05-03-2018

no proper client hires someone with low rates.

there simply HAS to be something wrong if someone is offering a low rate.

Either he is unaware of international prizes, or he lacks a sense of business, or his work is too bad to charge more, or he has such a low self-esteem and lack of self-reflection that he thinks his work isn't worth more.

How stupid would a freelancer be to charge 500$ for a design

when US prizes are 5000$ for the same work?

In any case those are not the freelancers that good clients search for.

Cheap freelancers attract cheap clients. Get red of cheap clients, raise your rate, and get cool clients, with cool work, and nice payment.

nessein · ‎06-05-2018

...It's also because so much communication is digital: Offering $10 on-line is one thing, looking someone in the eye - in person - and offering $10 is quite another. I dont think many sincere potential clients could honestly offer such a small amount in person or indeed over the telephone, skype etc.