AR question and pricing?

Wow…congratulations.

If you have never done a Verge3D or AR application I would strongly suggest finding someone with a lot of experience to help you out for pricing, project planning and just avoiding the major pitfalls if not helping you out. I am sure there are many users on this forum that would be able to offer such help.

Pricing is a tricky thing. It requires knowledge of the customer. If your customer is small business that makes only $100,000K a year their budget is going to much different from a company that as revenues of $1,000,000,000. If you don’t have someone experienced on your team that does pricing, you are going to have to decided what are you wanting to make for the time and effort you are going to put in. You can start this by stating an amount of money you would want to make per year if you did this project for an entire year.
Lets say that amount is $120,000 (i choose this number for math simplicity). So this means one month of your time is $10,000. You then determine how long it will take you to complete your project (this is the base production time). Lets say it takes 6 weeks. So thats $15,000. And if you are familiar with doing these sort of things there will be numerous rounds of changes that you will have to account for…so lets say you offer 4 rounds of changes at 1 week each, so that adds $10,000 more. Then you have to account for your margin of error…(10 week project – 25% error). 2.5 week additional so additional $7500. This is the base. You then need to consider what are your expenses for the project, software, hardware, vendors, plugins, licensing fees, health care, rent, legal fees etc. You add all that up and then agencies will add 5% to 50% margin on those items. You then you go back to your base amount and decide what margin you want. Agencies will charge anywhere from 5% to 50%.

Then add these up and you have a price.

Again this is very loose and only a general concept of typical pricing thoughts.

Knowing your customer is key.

Your next issue is getting the STL files into something that is low poly. In my experience I almost alway only use the STL as a reference model and rebuild the models to keep the poly counts low. If these objects will never have moving parts…then you can use more automated poly reduction like decimate. Your texture/shader/material needs will have a large impact on the approach you take. You will need an experienced low poly modeler to take a look at those and give you an estimated period of time to convert them. You also need to compare the time it will take to do the conversion to the overall project length as you may have to use an automated approach to meet your project timeline.

Depending on where you are located modeling can be farmed out pretty inexpensively but this will be heavily dependent on your region and whether your client will allow you to outsource. What ever you do do not assume you can outsource, especially with larger companies…its usually not allowed.

Now…you have AR and depending on your clients device and OS needs this could become two builds or if you are lucky its just one. If your client requires iOS and are picky about colors, lighting and textures and you need more interactivity than QuickLook provides you are going to be building a native app for iOS. So make sure you have all the business requirements for iOS if needed. FYI…textures for iOS may need to be recolorized depending on the materials you use. In my experience with my clients I have yet to have a V3D model export to USDZ using the same textures for android and iOS and the client be happy with the difference in colors but your client may be different.

So with all this said….no way to really help you with pricing. Its an artform in itself but more importantly…you need to be sure you capture all the requirements and needs so you can create a great SOW and then through the creation of that process you should be able to figure out your price.

Good luck.