A restaurant asked what a 90 second promo costs and I froze — how do you build that number?

Quote the project, never the hour. The hour punishes you for getting faster and it invites the client to argue about how long a colour pass should take. Build the number privately from days — half a day shoot, a day and a half edit, half a day of prep, comms and delivery — then add the wear on your kit and the fact that you cannot take other work on those days, and present one figure with what is included. Two rounds of revisions in writing, third round billed, that sentence alone has saved me more money than any gear purchase.

Run the arithmetic backwards from what you need to earn rather than forwards from what feels polite. Pick the annual figure you want, divide by the number of billable days you can realistically sell — for a solo shooter that is nowhere near 200, it is more like 90 to 120 once you count pitching, admin and the weeks nothing lands — and that gives you a day rate floor. Then a job like this is three to four of those days. Almost everyone starting out quotes about a third of what that maths says.

I undercharged my first restaurant job badly and the damage was not the money, it was that they came back three times at the same price and I had set the anchor. I also let revisions run open-ended and hit round seven, at which point I was earning less per hour than the person plating the food. Whatever number you land on, write down what stops the project, not just what starts it.

Mild disagreement with the pure day-rate approach: for small local clients the day rate conversation goes badly because they have no reference for what a day is worth, and they do have a reference for what the video is worth to them. I quote a package with a deliverable list — one 90 second cut, one 30 second cut for socials, vertical crop, licensed music — and the price sits against the value of the thing, not against my calendar. Same number, much easier conversation, and the extra deliverables cost me twenty minutes.