SO the connection has been made, the company needing video content meets the animator with the skills to make it. Discussions happen, possibilities multiply, and yet they both dance around the make-or-break, mystery numbers - how much are you charging/paying?
Of course, no client has bottomless pockets, but equally no producer can make videos for pennies for long. The longer either of those facts gets ignored, the less satisfying the consequences for all parties.
So how do we work out an acceptable price together? What do I, an animator, need to know to work out your quote? Ultimately, I (like pretty much all people in positions like mine) charge by the amount of time a job takes to do, give or take a little for things like type of client, how fun it is, how beneficial it'd be to me in other ways, etc - BUT the main factors that affect the cost of a project are:
LENGTH of video - obviously, a 10-second video takes less time to make than a similar 30-second one. Duh.
COMPLEXITY of video - animation comes in a huge variety of styles and techniques, which take varying amounts of time to create. This ranges from using templates, where a person like myself simply inputs some files into a program, presses 'render' and then submits the resulting file, to painstaking frame-by-frame work that can take weeks to do well. This could be a lengthy blog post in itself... [Note to self: Blog on this!] But basically we'll discuss it, swap Youtube links of styles we want to use as references, and from there I can give a pretty good estimate where we're standing in terms of man-hours.
READINESS OF BRIEF AND MATERIALS - If you've supplied me a signed-off final script, your ideas of how it'll look, reference links, icons, vector graphics (logos, pictures etc) and all I've got to do is piece it together into a flowing whole and add a few flourishes, that's great, that'll be a rapidly completed job with minimal changes. That's the dream. If, however, I get a vague script, need to create all the art, and have to spend a couple of days sending mock-ups back and forth to get a clear idea of what you need, that's fine by me but it's going to take significantly longer and, you've guessed it, will make a bigger impact on your pocket.
CHANGES - If I've spent a few days animating to a set of vague instructions, and it's not come out how you'd imagined, we'll have to go back a step and re-do some of it. Again, that's fine, but it'll cost you for the time it takes to do the amends. So for your bank balance's sake, make sure your team is all agreed on a style (I'd be keen to work with you at the idea generation stage until everyone is happy with it) and script before I begin! Lovely.
AUDIO - Who could forget! The options are use Creative Commons music, (free with attribution), pay a small amount extra to get some music composed, get some commercial tune licensed ($$!), or be music-less. Decent basic-level sound effects can be sourced for free, otherwise for more complex/original things you'll need to pay a bit more again. Similar themes apply for voiceover - do a basic, not-so-professional-sounding job for free, borrow some decent kit and record it yourself for free, or pay a bit more to get it professionally done. Again, the earlier these decisions are made, the easier it is for me, and so the cheaper it is for you! I will normally record a rough voiceover in the meantime for animation timing purposes.
SPEED - Need it yesterday? Buy a time machine. Not got the budget for the time machine? Get it for tomorrow instead, for an extra cost.
OTHER THINGS - like multiple delivery formats, specific resolution requirements, physical copies, etc, might cost you a little bit more but generally very little.
IN SUMMARY, videos can be done for surprisingly cheap, but quickly escalate into the thousands when you start cranking up all the variables. Try and give your friendly animator as many specifics as you can about the project, including links to other videos you're looking at, to enable a meaningful quote. Also, having lots of key decisions made and assets ready before the animation process begins will save you money big time!