How much can you earn with Blender 3D Logo Animation?

How much can you earn with Blender 3D Logo Animation?

While working on some new logo animation for my own company recently (for a rebranding to “3D Secrets” rather than “Blender Secrets” - out of respect for the Blender Foundation mostly) I started thinking back about my early days as a freelancer.

Some of you might be trying to start a career with 3D animation, and it’s not looking great at the moment because you see all the negative discourse about the VFX industry, mass layoffs in the gaming industry and of course AI.

But, I’m here to tell you there’s actually plenty of work in 3D. You see, there’s not really a “3D industry”, there are just many industries that all take advantage of it.

And one interesting place to start is logo animation. It’s actually one of the first things I did when I started my freelance career, and I knew precious little about Blender back then. I just used it every now and then, and learned a ton each time. Mostly I made simple 2D animations in After Effects.

One of my first clients was a very small (2-person) video agency who made videos for small local businesses. They would offer a short 10-second logo animation as an order bump to their clients when they were booked for producing a video. When these clients accepted, they asked me to make the animation. I’d (sometimes) get the vector files of their logo, and off I went.

This kind of arrangement can be very beneficial when you’re starting out. Because you’re still wasting a lot of time learning stuff (I mean that never changes, but more than normal) and so you can’t really spend too much time finding clients, and your portfolio won’t be impressive enough yet that clients automatically flock to you. So if someone else is doing that work for you, great. They probably add 10% or 20% on top of what you charge them when they invoice their client.

I charged way to little for this at the time - I think 200 or 250 euro for 10 seconds of logo animation. But I could typically make them in about 3 or 4 hours, maybe a bit more if I had to learn something new. Once in a while I did something fancy with 3D animation, that might have taken longer.

Below: Early freelance work, one of the 3D-animations I did for a video agency, in 2017.

I probably could have charged double at the time, but like so many artists transitioning to paid work, I didn’t know any better. But The good thing about charging some small amount to an agency or a bigger business that needs animation sometimes but wants to subcontract it - is that 200 to 500 euro is really not that much money for them. They don’t have to think too hard about it. If you underpromise and overdeliver, and do it really well so they don’t have to give too much or any feedback - they’ll remember you when they need a bigger job done. You’ll have your foot in the door.

The fun thing about logo animation is that you’re just making their existing logo come alive, which will make them happy to see, and there’s not really much of a story to tell, so there also typically isn’t a ton of feedback with this kind of work. In my experience (I’ve made maybe a dozen of these) I’ve never really had any feedback where I had to change something, as far as I can remember.

So how much would I charge today, and how much should you charge?

Usually the instinct of beginner freelancers is to charge by the hour, but I wouldn’t advice you to do that. Instead, charge a fixed price and base it on the client.

Because you’re giving your client something of value, and how much that value is, depends not on you, but on them (and on the value of their logo).

The thing you’re doing is worth more also to one client or the other. Think of some local shop, maybe a really cool bakery that has a long queu every morning and where you sometimes go to buy a croissant. Maybe they know you and they find out what you do. Maybe they ask you to animate their logo (if they even have one)! But what’s that worth to them? It’ll be fun for their social media posts, but will it bring them any value? So if you charge them 500 euro, that’s basically a cost that at best, helps them reduce their profit a bit so they need to pay less taxes. Not really very valuable then.

For a big company though, they typically have tons of video. And they always need their logo animation in front of it. Big companies use a lot of video internally to communicate, and between businesses, and for communicating with their clients. So for them, having a shitty logo animation is a risk. Because it’s the first thing people see in their video, and it hurts their brand. So the value you’re bringing is that you don’t suck, basically. And really the only way they can feel that you don’t suck, is if you’re expensive. If you give them a quote for 500 euro, they’re just going to assume it can’t possibly be any good. If it’s 5.000, now they’re paying attention.

That high price means, that you are confident in your abilities. And that you have enough clients coming to you, that you can turn clients down (the ones who want to pay less). That’s super important and you need to really understand this, not just for logo animation but any kind of client work. I’ve been on both sides of this, and if I have to pay very little for something, I worry that it won’t be good. It also means that there will be many revisions, and I’ll have lots of little extra invoices to pay. I hate that.

If your profit margin is high enough, even if you have to do revisions (it happens), at least it only eats away at your profit margin. The client doesn’t have to suffer from it, the price you agreed just stays the same. They just want you to deliver the promised result (and not have to waste too much time themselves - that’s why they’ve got you. Trust me, clients don’t want to give feedback or ask for revisions any more than you want to receive them).

When I was starting out, I just took any client I could get because I didn’t have much runway (big mistake). So of course a lot of them were “price buyers” (clients who just want a cheap service, rather than something good).

And really, you don’t want clients like that. Luckily it’s very easy to feel if a client is a “Price buyer”, typically they will ask immediately about the price, and then remark that it’s very expensive. That’s all you really need to know. Just tell them to save a bit more money and come back later (when you’ve gotten more expensive…).

Serious clients choose “less risk” in the form of confidence in you, the expert, based mostly on your high price (and the fact that you’ve established yourself as an expert online, by showing your work and maybe even making tutorials etc). They don’t know about 3D animation or what a good logo looks like or any of that. They trust you to know about that stuff. They just don’t want the risk they’d have with a cheap price. Because that means they’ll have to spend time revising and telling you what they want. It’s a nightmare for both parties. Price high, you’re doing everyone a favour.

Now how do you get your first customers? I recommend just to start making some logo animations. You’ll need at least something for your portfolio and you’ll need to have an idea of how long it takes on average to do the work.

I recommend going with a very consistent style, and really trying to make great work. Less is more, better 5 really good ones than 20 bad ones. And try not to mix it up with unrelated posts. It’s a good idea to just make a separate account for posting only your portfolio pieces (on Instagram). Do only that very specific thing, and show you’re an expert. And then maybe get in touch with some local video agencies (not the ones who do animation, the ones that do corporate videos). They might be looking for someone like you.

I know it can be hard to say no to those cheap assignments at first, because you want to make money. But that’s why I think you shouldn’t start doing this when you have no other income. Have either a good runway (ie. savings) or even better, a McJob. You can quit that once you’ve created enough runway to last you over for a few months.

Remember, every time you say yes you also say no (to someone else). When you say yes to bad client A, you now are forced to say NO to awesome client B (who showed up just a little too late, the next day) because you’re now busy. You should have said NO to bad client A… then you’d be happily making Awesome client B’s logo animation the next day.

So how much you should charge really depends on the client and the value you're giving to them. So it could be 500 or 5.000 euro. Or more!

Some things to keep in mind:

1) Ask if you can get the vector files (they normally have these), if not that's extra work for you to reverse-engineer them. Put that in your quote!

2) What kind of deliverables do they need? Some clients suddenly also need still renders, a vertical version for tiktok, etc... make sure you know it all in advance.

3) Agree on a number of milestones with revisions. If there's even more work beyond the scope agreed on, you can switch to an hourly rate, make sure you have that in your contract so you don't end up working extra for free.

4) Ask for an advance! 40% or 50% is pretty standard. The rest can be paid for delivery of the final result. You can also split it in 40-30-30 (Advance, first milestone, delivery) if it’s a more expensive project or something that takes longer.

5) If they ask for the project files (this often happens nowadays), the client needs to pay extra for that. Make sure you communicate that in your quote as well (they might simply not know). By the way, in some countries (like Belgium, where I am) selling your project files in some cases means you need to pay less taxes on that project’s profit, because you’re selling your authorship over those files. Check with your accountant to see if this is the case.

I hope that helps some of you, and feel free to comment below.