Your rate comes from three things: the hours a piece really takes including the script, the revisions and the publishing, what one billable hour costs you, and what the client is buying on top of the edit, such as exclusivity or paid usage rights. Time three real pieces before you quote any number at all.
The invisible half of a piece
The question usually arrives badly framed. Nobody buys a reel. They buy an idea that has been scripted, filmed, edited, corrected twice, subtitled, published at a particular hour and watched over while the first comments come in. Shooting is the visible part and it is almost never the expensive one.
So the arithmetic does not start at how many hours it takes. It starts at five separate boxes, because a single field lets you leave out exactly what you always leave out.
| Stage | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Idea and script | Finding references, writing it and showing it to the client |
| Shooting | The shoot itself, setting the place up and packing it down |
| Editing and subtitles | The cut, music, titles and burned in subtitles |
| Revisions | The ones you end up doing, not the ones the contract allows |
| Publishing and reporting | Uploading, scheduling, answering the first comments and saying how it went |
Time three real pieces, end to end, with the clock running while you wait for the client to reply as well. The average you read online is not your average: it depends on your workflow, your team and above all on how many rounds a piece goes through before it ships. If the total is higher than you expected, that is precisely the number that justifies the rate.
From what you need to bill to your hourly cost
The second number is yours and not the market's. Start from what you need to bill in a year: your own pay plus what it costs to keep the business standing, the self employed contribution, the accountant, software, kit, insurance and the month when nothing comes in. Divide that by the hours you can genuinely bill, which are not all the hours you work.
That is where a rate turns into a loss. If you work 220 days a year at eight hours and split the target across those 1,760 hours, you are charging as though selling, quoting, administrating and fixing things were free. A realistic billable fraction for a freelancer who also finds their own work sits around half the working day, and that correction doubles the hourly cost. It is not a trick to charge more: it is the cost you were already paying without counting it.
With those two pieces, hours per piece and hourly cost, the base rate is a multiplication. What follows, direct costs and margin, is added on top, and only afterwards does the conversation about what the client will pay begin. To do it without building a spreadsheet, the reel rate calculator asks for exactly these inputs and gives you two figures at once: the price of the piece and what you would end up earning per hour.
The arithmetic, with example numbers
The numbers below are invented and exist only to show the order of the operations.
Say you need to bill 45,000 euros a year, you work 220 days at eight hours, and you can bill half of that time. That is 880 billable hours, so your hourly cost is around 51 euros. A piece that takes one hour of scripting, two of shooting, two and a half of editing, half an hour of revisions and half an hour of publishing is 6.5 hours, roughly 332 of work. Add 40 of travel and licensed music and the direct cost reaches 372.
Now the margin, which is not profit: it is the cushion for the shoot that goes wrong, the client who pays at 90 days and the quiet month. With a 30 per cent margin on the fee, the price is 372 divided by 0.7, about 531 per piece. Divide that by the 6.5 hours and you know what you earn per hour, which is the figure worth having in front of you the day somebody asks for a discount.
Two warnings about that result. It is a price before VAT, the value added tax charged in Spain, and an invoice to a Spanish company may also carry an IRPF withholding, an advance on income tax, deducted from the total: less reaches the bank than the figure you agreed. Confirm it with your accountant. And a single piece rarely pays: the coordination cost is the same for one as for four, so a monthly package works out better for both sides.
There is one more reading of that same arithmetic worth doing before you sit down to negotiate. Take what you charge today for a piece, divide it by the hours it really takes and compare the result with your hourly cost. If it comes out below, you are paying for part of every piece yourself, and a bigger margin will not fix it because the problem is in the cost. If it comes out above, the question stops being whether to raise the rate and becomes what else is included at that price, which is a far better conversation to have.
What is not a cost is a price
Some of what a client buys costs you no extra hours at all. Confusing those with costs is what makes a rate look expensive when it is not, because they are being given away in silence.
| Extra | What they are buying | Starting point |
|---|---|---|
| Exclusivity | That you will not work for their competitors for an agreed period | 15 per cent on the piece |
| Paid usage | That the piece runs as an ad, by platform and by period | 25 per cent |
| Second cut | The same footage edited for another format or another network | 20 per cent |
| Rush delivery | That it jumps ahead of what you had already planned | 30 per cent |
Those percentages are a starting point and not a tariff. Push them up when the exclusivity runs long, when the paid usage has no end date, or when the rush eats a weekend. And treat them as separate lines on the quote, because a client who sees the breakdown negotiates the extra rather than the whole piece.
Paid usage is the one that leaves the most money uncharged. A video that will sit behind an advertising budget for six months is worth something different from the same video posted once on a profile, and clients understand that perfectly well when they are asked by platform and by period instead of for a generic permission.
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeWhat is included, in writing
The argument about price is almost never about price. It is about scope. A rate with no written scope becomes, three pieces later, a lower rate than the one you agreed, because the work grew and the number did not.
Six lines head off most of those conversations. The number of revisions included and what the next one costs. Whether the script is yours or theirs. Whether there is an actor, a location or props, and who pays for them. Whether travel is included and up to how many kilometres. Turnaround and response times, in both directions, because a client who takes a week to reply moves your whole calendar. And who approves, which in a company with three opinions is the most important line of all.
Writing them down is not bureaucracy, it is what makes the rate mean the same thing in six months. The social media contract guide works through each of those lines, and in an agency the quote, the contract and the invoice with your own number series and your own VAT all come out of the same place, which is what the quotes and invoices page is for.
Raising your rate without losing the client
A rate that is never reviewed falls on its own, because your costs rise even when the number stands still. The annual review is maintenance: two months of notice, applied to new clients first, never to everybody in the same month.
What makes the conversation easy is arriving with the quarter's data in front of you. Not reach, which answers a different question, but what happened to the pieces: retention, saves, comments, and follows where the network attributes them. If your videos are watched to the end and the old ones were not, that is an argument; if you do not know, the conversation will be about the price instead. Exactly what to look at is in the reel retention guide.
And there is one case worth recognising early: a client who does not see the result will not accept any adjustment, reasonable or small. That is not a pricing problem, it is an expectations problem nobody wrote down at the start, and it gets fixed before the next proposal or it does not get fixed. When the work goes past single pieces and becomes ongoing management, the arithmetic changes shape, and it is in how to price social media management.