The Industry Already Tried to Solve Creative Pricing. It Got Shut Down.

It is a shared experience for creatives to sit in front of a blank proposal and have no idea what to charge. In schools we are taught the skills to be creative, but nobody taught us what the creative market is actually worth. We hear about big agencies charging huge sums, and we see the dumping prices on platforms like Fiverr, but what about all of us in between? There is little information out there to compare ourselves to.

So what happens is we guess, we base our prices on what the client is willing to pay, or we ask a friend, who also guessed their rates. Freelancers are in the dark about what the market value is of their work, and what most people don't know is that the industry has tried to fix this exact structural problem before.

Why does the creative industry lack transparency?

Creative pricing is unusually opaque, compared to other professions. Lawyers have publicly available fee structures. Architects work within regulated fee frameworks. Accountants have professional bodies that publish guidance on rates. These industries have reference points, so anyone starting out knows roughly what the market looks like before they sit down to write a quote.

Creatives have almost none of this. There is no regularly updated, publicly available data on what design, branding, illustration, and other creative work actually costs. The result is that pricing in our industry is driven largely by intuition, rumour, and client pricing expectations which are low thanks to spec work and online freelancer platforms. The outcome is predictable for an industry that never built the infrastructure for pricing transparency.

The attempt that got shut down

In 2002, the Wirtschaftskammer Österreich (WKO) and Designaustria, a professional association for graphic designers, illustrators, and product designers in Austria, produced a fee guideline for the creative industry. It was based on real survey data collected from commercial graphic designers and agencies across Austria. It was exactly the kind of reference the industry had always lacked.

But unfortunately the publication was discontinued and pulled from the market. Under the Austrian Kartellgesetz 2005 and EU competition law, these kind of price recommendations issued by a professional association were treated as equivalent to a cartel.

The problem was not that the 2002 guidelines named prices. It was how they were being used. Once courts began referencing them as evidence of what the industry "should" charge, they stopped functioning as non-binding guidance and started functioning as an enforced standard. That distinction, between a reference point and a standard rate card, is exactly where the law draws the line. The WKO subsequently issued an explicit statement that members were prohibited from applying fee and calculation guidelines of this kind, and the Fachverband Werbung und Marktkommunikation formally revoked all its fee and calculation guidelines.

Around 2018, the industry tried again. Designaustria and the WKO Wien Fachgruppe Werbung published a second attempt called "Design: Kalkulation & Honorar." This time the publishers navigated the legal issue by surveying member businesses about the fees they actually invoiced, and publishing that as real market price data rather than recommended rates. They offered a range, rather than a definitive number of what creatvies “should” charge. This time it was descriptive, and not prescriptive.

Finally the industry had a reference point again.

What two decades of opacity cost the industry

The absence of pricing data does not just leave creatives in the dark, it accelerates a race to the bottom and allows clients to dictate our prices.

When nobody knows what the work is actually worth, the lowest price becomes the reference point. Clients have come to expect it, and now, without anyone making a deliberate decision to devalue the industry, rates have become meaningless.

According to a survey conducted by Designaustria in 2017, creative rates dropped by up to 40% in real terms between 2007 and 2017. The same survey found that 3 in 10 self-employed designers in Austria earn less than €20,000 gross per year. Not because they are working less, but because without shared reference points, pricing decisions default to insecurity, and insecurity defaults to low.

Opacity does not hurt everyone equally. It disproportionately affects people who are newer to the industry, those who don't have the right network, and who don’t have access to the informal conversations where pricing information gets shared.

The legal reality is a trade association cannot publish recommended rates for its members, but that doesn’t mean pricing transparency is impossible. It just means that the solution has to be different.

What transparency actually looks like

Descriptive data is legal, and prescriptive guidelines are not. What cartel law prohibits is coordination, which means telling competitors what to charge. What it does not prohibit is information, so descriptive data about what people have actually charged, collected and published transparently. It is market information similar to the kind of transparency that exists for salaries, property prices, and legal fees. Nobody suggests that these efforts in other industries are an example of coordinating wages or rents.

Faktor is the digital, scalable, continuously updated version of what the Designaustria 2018 publication did, and it is built on the same principle.

The Faktor calculator does not tell you what to charge. It takes your inputs, your experience level, your costs, your client's industry and project scope, and returns an informed range. The calulated rate is a starting point, but the final number is always yours to decide, because context matters in ways no tool can fully account for. What the calculator does is replace the guess with a reasoned reference point.

The rate database we are developing works the same way. Real project rates submitted anonymously by real creatives, browsable by discipline, experience level, region, and more. It is not a standard, but simply a record of what people have actually charged, so that anyone can see what the market looks like before they sit down to write a quote.

Together they give creatives something the industry has been missing: not a one-size fits all answer to “what should a logo cost”, but the information needed to find the answer that makes sense to you. We are not telling anyone what to charge. We want creatives to make decisions about their pricing that are informed by real economic market data as opposed to comparing their prices to the bottom of the barrel, or letting a client’s budget dictate the price.

The floor rises when everyone has data

Pricing transparency can change the industry. When more creatives have access to real market data, the race to the bottom loses its fuel. When a junior designer in Vienna can see what people with their experience level are charging for branding projects, they have a number to hold on to instead of a guess. When a studio in Berlin can benchmark its rates against a database of actual real world examples, it has something concrete to bring to a client conversation.

Faktor is all about creating resources that help creatives get paid fairly for work that has real value.

Want to help build the database? Submit your project rates at faktor.so/database. Every submission helps.

Or try the calculator and see what your work is actually worth.