How to price custom resin commissions

A commission is not your usual piece with a tweak

When you pour a stock piece you already know the mould, the colours, the timing and roughly how it'll turn out. A commission throws most of that away. You're making something once, you've never made it before, and there's a specific person waiting who has a picture in their head that you have never seen.

That uncertainty is the product. It's why custom work costs more, and it's the bit that gets left out of the price almost every time. Makers price the resin and the pigment and the mould, all the things you can hold, and then donate the forty messages, the three colour samples and the evening spent looking for dried cornflowers in exactly the right blue.

Three hours. Half of it before you've mixed anything. If you quote that piece at your usual $60 you've covered your time and nothing else, which means your materials, your overhead and your actual profit have all come out of your own pocket. Custom work priced like stock work is a slow way to fund other people's gifts.

Quoting when the design doesn't exist yet

The hardest part is that people want a price before either of you knows what's being made. Give a firm number too early and you're stuck with it when the brief grows. Refuse to give any number and half of them go quiet, because they genuinely have no idea whether they're asking for a fifty dollar thing or a four hundred dollar thing.

A range fixes both problems. Tell them coastal pieces in that size usually land between $85 and $140 depending on the inclusions and the finish, and that you'll confirm once you know what's going in it. You've given them enough to decide whether to keep talking, and you haven't signed anything.

1. Ask what it's for and when they need it, because a deadline is a price factor and a memorial piece is a different conversation from a coffee table.
2. Give a range, not a number, and say plainly what would push it to the top of that range.
3. Once you agree the design, send one written confirmation with the final price, what's included and the date.
4. Treat anything asked for after that message as a new conversation rather than an adjustment.

Tip. Keep a note of what each commission actually took you, in hours, not in vibes. After five or six you'll be quoting from your own history instead of your own optimism, and your quotes will go up.

Deposits are normal, not rude

Taking money up front feels awkward the first few times, particularly when the customer is lovely and has sent three heart emojis. Take it anyway. A deposit is how you stop being the person who buys $60 of specialist moulds for a piece that quietly gets cancelled in a fortnight.

Half up front is the usual arrangement, with the balance before it ships. For a piece needing materials you'd never otherwise buy, ask for the full cost of those materials in the deposit, because those are the ones you can't recover if the whole thing evaporates.

Nobody has ever walked away from me over a deposit who was going to be a good customer. The ones who bristle at paying anything before seeing the finished thing are, with impressive reliability, the same ones who go silent when the invoice arrives.

What a revision actually costs you

Resin isn't a drawing. You can't nudge the blue a bit once it's cured. A revision usually means pouring the whole thing again, which is fresh resin, another go at the mould, another two days of cure time and another evening of sanding.

So decide up front what's included and say so in the confirmation message. One round of changes at the design stage, before anything is poured, costs you almost nothing and makes people feel looked after. Changes after the pour cost you the entire piece, and that has to be either priced in or charged for.

• Colour samples or a sketch before pouring, included, because this is where changes are cheap.
• One reasonable tweak at the design stage, included.
• A repour because they've changed their mind, charged at materials plus your time.
• A repour because it genuinely came out wrong, on you, every time, without sulking about it.

Watch out. That last one matters. Bubbles, a soft cure or a bad demould are your risk, and covering them is what your failure allowance in the calculator is for. A maker who argues about their own mistakes gets no repeat customers and one long review.

Keepsakes and the risk you can't put a price on

Sooner or later somebody posts you their wedding bouquet, or their grandmother's handwriting, or their dog's collar. Keepsake work is some of the most rewarding resin you'll ever do and it carries a risk nothing else does, because if it goes wrong you cannot make another one.

Charge more for these. The resin doesn't cost you any extra, but you'll work slower, you'll test more, and you'll take a level of care that simply isn't possible on a batch of coasters. Somewhere between a third and half again on top of your usual custom price is normal, and people who've entrusted you with their mother's roses are rarely the ones haggling.

• Say in writing what you can and can't promise, especially that flowers change colour as they dry and that this is the flower doing it rather than you.
• Ask them to send photographs of the materials before posting, so you both know what arrived.
• Suggest they hold some back if there's any way to, so a disaster isn't total.
• Do a test pour with a spare bloom where the materials allow it.

Saying no, or saying a bigger number

Some commissions shouldn't be taken, and you can usually tell in the first three messages. The person who opens with what's your best price. The one who wants it in nine days when resin needs three of those just to cure. The one describing a piece that would take you eleven hours for a budget of eighty dollars.

You don't have to refuse outright. Quote the real number and let them decide. Half the time they say yes, which teaches you something useful about what your work is worth, and the other half they say no and you've lost nothing but a couple of messages. That's a much better outcome than four resentful weekends.

The one to actually turn down is the piece you can't make well. A commission that goes out wrong follows you around in photographs for years, and no fee makes that a good trade.