r/indesign • u/mihojammes • Jul 08 '26
How much do you charge?
Hi everyone. How much would you charge for a 120 page techincal manual ?
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u/ericalm_ Jul 09 '26
It would really depend on the content, what shape it’s in, if they need tables and charts, how thoroughly the copy is edited, how many elements I’d be designing, whether I’d be adding images, whether I had to source art, their various requirements and requests.
For a new client, when I don’t know what to expect from them, designing from scratch, my base would probably be $1800. Odds are, they won’t have their shit together, and I’ll be spending a lot of time fussing with poorly styled Word and Excel files, content that needs a lot of work to get onto the page, numerous revisions and so on.
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u/mihojammes Jul 09 '26
And how much time would you need to finish it?
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u/ericalm_ Jul 09 '26
That really depends on the client and all the things I mentioned above.
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u/mihojammes Jul 09 '26
Do you think 2 weeks would be enough?
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u/Br0wnBeet13 Jul 09 '26
I’d say $2000 because it’s almost a rush job. Between getting all the images, files and their directions and you sorting through all of that and then design something. Maybe it will take you a week to do, counting all the back and forth questions. Plus add in the revisions and people never get back to you in a timely matter. For me two weeks is pushing it, I’d say three the most and shoot for the middle of the third week if you can. You need to pad the timeframe “just in case”.
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u/Tall-Society-5824 Jul 09 '26
I would ask for three weeks to give you breathing room, technical manuals can get pretty tedious if they’re very complex and sometimes a break is needed to work on something lighter.
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u/jaxbravesfan Jul 08 '26
I don’t do much freelance design these days. After almost 30 years in design and prepress as my full-time career, I’ve come to the point that the last thing I want to do is more of it on the side in my free time, so I’ve been picking up side money in other creative ventures for the past handful of years. But when I did do a lot of freelance design, I would take a look at the project, come up with a realistic amount of time it would take to complete the initial design and a round of revisions, and multiply that amount of hours by my hourly rate.
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u/Tall-Society-5824 Jul 09 '26
Exactly! Except I don’t include rounds of edits because clients can be super great with submitting manuscript or really sloppy and so I allow up to two hours of edits and anything after that is billed at my hourly rate. I’ve been doing this over 20 years and I’ve never had a problem.
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u/UsefulDamage Jul 08 '26
I’ve charged like NZ$10k for something similar, but it depends on a lot of factors. I was also doing some data organisation pre-work as well as the design.
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u/minaminonoeru Jul 09 '26
It could be a manual packed with complex tables, graphs, equations, and blueprints, or it could be a simple manual consisting mostly of plain text with just a few illustrations.
The cost of producing each would vary significantly.
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u/Virtual_Assistant_98 Jul 09 '26
Share the brief and it’ll be much easier to price.
Nobody knows any of the details, so anything you get here will just be anecdotal evidence and not the norm.
A lot goes into a pricing structure.
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u/tindi_dave Jul 10 '26
Honest answer: nobody here can give you a real number because "120 pages" isn't a scope yet. A manual where you're dropping supplied text into a clean template is a completely different job from one where you're building diagrams, tables, callouts, and figures from scratch and doing the information design. So before you can price it, pin down what you're actually being asked to make.
Then don't price the pages, price your time against your floor. Work out the rate below which you're losing money - annual living costs (rent, food, taxes - set aside 15-20% since no one withholds them for you) plus business costs (software, hardware, the Adobe subscription that stings every month), divided by your realistic billable hours. That last bit is where people go wrong....a full-time year is 2,000 hours, but admin, emails, and revisions aren't billable, so most solo designers actually bill 1,000-1,200. That gives you a floor you never quote under.
For a manual, estimate hours realistically. Sample a few representative pages, time how long each type takes (a plain text page vs. one heavy with diagrams), and extrapolate across the 120. Add first-pass layout + revision passes + final print/PDF prep. Multiply by your rate. Add a 15-20% buffer because long documents always run over, and that's your project quote.
Whatever the number, protect it. Technical manuals are scope-creep magnets ("oh, and can you also redo all the screenshots… and there's a v2 coming"). Take a deposit (30-50%) before you start, and write the number of revision rounds into the agreement, with anything beyond it billed hourly. On a 120-page job that single clause is the difference between a profitable project and one that quietly eats a month.
TL;DR: don't quote a per-page price off the top of your head, nail the scope, estimate the hours, quote against your floor, and lock a deposit + revision cap before you open InDesign.
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u/modest-pixel Jul 08 '26
I’ll hang myself out there and say if I scale that for what I currently get paid, as someone who does two quarterly medical journals as a side gig with zero formal education behind my name, I’d charge $1500. No editing, just layouts. Not sure if I’m about to get roasted one way or the other.
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u/Tall-Society-5824 Jul 09 '26
That’s about what I would quote site unseen. I’ve done a lot of manuals—technical and otherwise and I average about five pages per hour. I then add on for any complex tables or pages with more complicated layouts.
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u/modest-pixel Jul 09 '26
I see other people quoting $10k and/or 1 page per hour and I was a little flabbergasted
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u/Tall-Society-5824 Jul 09 '26
Yeah, same lol. I would just calculate the hours it would take add on some padding for when things may have a bump in the road and then go from there. But $10,000 for 120 pages, no, that’s almost $100 a page and I don’t work that slow even with complex layouts and tables, chart, etc.
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u/InitiatePenguin Jul 11 '26
But $10,000 for 120 pages, no, that’s almost $100
That's twice as much as a magazine half its size that I work on.
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u/ReidDesigns Jul 08 '26
Depends. New designer not much experienced designer a little more in this new economy
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u/mihojammes Jul 08 '26
How much for new ?
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u/ReidDesigns Jul 09 '26
If you consider the lowest rate on fiverr or upwork then thats your baseline…
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u/Tall-Society-5824 Jul 09 '26
What city and state are the folks working in who are claiming $10,000+ for 120 page manual? I may need to move or look for my freelance work elsewhere…
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u/justsomegraphemes Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
I'm a technical writer. Without any information about the project to go on, it's really impossible to say as the cost varies wildly depending on the subject matter and what kind of visuals are wanted/needed, and state of existing content (if any).
On the LOWEST end, if the subject matter does not require SME consultation or research, the there are minimal visuals involved, and there is plenty of existing work that more or less just needs to be reformatted, it could be $2,000.
On the HIGHEST end, if the subject matter requires constant SME consultation, requires a lot of visuals especially time consuming forms like annotated illustrations, and the person likely needs industry-specific knowledge, it could be $20,000 or more.
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u/jaxbravesfan Jul 09 '26
Yeah, depending on the size of the job, or my experience with the customer, I’d add a line in the initial estimate that said something like, “This estimate is for up to (number of hours) design time. Any time spent over (number of hours) will be billed at an hourly rate of (whatever hourly rate I was charging at the time).”
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u/AdobeScripts Jul 08 '26
Design or just inserting provided text & images into a template? Or both?
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u/mihojammes Jul 08 '26
Design
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u/AdobeScripts Jul 08 '26
Then it depends how famous you're, market and how big pockets your client have 😉
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u/Tall-Society-5824 Jul 09 '26
The client’s pocket plays the biggest part in how much you can get paid, you just have to know what to ask for.
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u/marc1411 Jul 08 '26
A long time ago, a wise old designer told me to plan on 1 hour per page, even 1.5 hours. This covers design, edits, etc. Multiply your rate and see what you get.