Budgets. One of those topics that makes every filmmaker feel a slight knot in their stomach—no matter how many years of experience they have. But for beginners, it’s a whole different ballgame. I remember it well; I went through it myself. You’re sitting in front of a blank email to a client, wrestling with a dilemma: “If I charge as much as the seasoned pros, I won’t get the job. If I undercut the price, I’ll be working under pressure for peanuts, and those same pros will call me out on social media for ruining the market.”
Work for free? Not so fast.
There’s a theory going around that as a beginner filmmaker, you should do a few jobs for free — build up your portfolio — and only then start asking for money. I come across this regularly, and I’ve never been able to agree with it one hundred percent.
Try to imagine a bricklayer who first renovates four bathrooms for free so he has something to show potential clients. Absurd, isn’t it? So why does it seem normal to filmmakers? We filmmakers sometimes tend to romanticize our craft, but it’s still a craft.
I would distinguish between two things here: school and work. Your initial portfolio should consist of projects you worked on while you were learning—at school, in film workshops, from experiments when you picked up a camera as a hobby and tried everything under the sun. I might be a bit blunt here, but if you can’t put together even a two-minute showreel from that material that demonstrates how you think and what you can shoot, that’s a sign—that it might still be too early for you to ask for money for your work.
But even with a portfolio, it’s not as simple as it might seem.
A portfolio alone won’t get you a job — jobs come from people
Filmmakers have always looked for work differently than most professions. Not through ads, not through LinkedIn banners, not through a well-curated Instagram. In this industry, only one thing works reliably: referrals.
When someone needs a cinematographer, they rarely search for one on Google. They’re much more likely to ask a friend or colleague: “Hey, do you know anyone good with a camera?” And at that moment, what matters is how you performed on your last project—not what your website looks like.
A portfolio is important. It’s great to be able to show a potential client: this is what I can do, this is how I work, this is my style. But I would never rely on it as the primary tool for landing jobs. That role belongs to relationships and reputation.
Pricing: Where It All Falls Apart
And now we come to the part that actually got me thinking about what to include in the planner.
Many aspiring filmmakers base their decisions on what they think the client will pay—not on what their skills, time, and equipment actually cost. The result? They undervalue themselves, burn out, or take on projects that don’t make them any money at all after expenses are deducted. Meanwhile, the more experienced professionals in the industry criticize them for distorting market pricing.
That’s why I included the Budget Planner in Filmari — one of the more complex tools in the app, but also one that I missed the most in practice.
How it works: from rates to export
My Rates: the foundation everything else builds on
It all starts in your profile, in the My Rates section. Here you set your default hourly rates — separately for shooting, editing, color grading, and sound. Each activity has a different physical and mental demand, so it makes sense for them to have different prices.
Two things to keep in mind here:
Minimum rate for filming. Going out to shoot for even half an hour means packing up all your gear, traveling, unpacking, and packing up again. And that takes time, whether you’re shooting for an hour or a whole day. The same goes for editing. Even if you’re editing a one-minute video that you could theoretically finish in an hour, setting up the project, communicating, gathering raw footage, finding music, and so on all take time. That’s why it’s good to have a minimum budget in place—without it, you simply won’t take on the project.
Overtime rules. We’ve all been there—a planned 6-hour shoot stretches to 12. Preset rules (e.g., after 8 hours × 1.2, after 10 hours × 1.5) let you bill fairly without having to figure it out on the spot as things unfold.
Project type as a multiplier
Not all projects are the same. I approach a commercial ad differently than an indie film project by friends I met online, and differently still than a video for a nonprofit organization. Filmari lets you set project types with custom multipliers—you simply multiply or divide the final amount based on the context.
Taxes and deductions — what beginners forget
Even though taxes are a bit of a boring topic, they need to be included here. Young filmmakers often calculate the gross income from a project and think that’s their earnings. It isn’t. Contributions, VAT, income tax—all of these will be deducted from that amount. Budget Planner will remind you of this during the calculation so you aren’t caught off guard at the end of the quarter.
Billing info in your profile
In your profile, you can pre-fill your own billing information as well as the details of clients you work with regularly. This comes in handy when generating summaries — it saves you from having to manually copy and paste the information for every project.
Budget Planner in a Project: Where It All Comes Together
Once you’ve set up My Rates, working in the Budget Planner becomes concrete—you enter actual project data.
Time: How many days of shooting, how many hours of editing, color grading, and sound.
Project Type: Select a category and the multiplier is applied automatically.
Gear: This is something many filmmakers ignore — yet it’s crucial. If you bring one camera to a project, the calculation is different than if you bring a full multicam setup. Through the Inventory section, you can set prices for individual pieces of equipment (including whether they’re owned or rented) and add them directly to the project budget.
Revisions: Typically, 2 – 3 free revisions are included. But without a clear agreement in advance, you can easily slip into an endless loop of changes—one title a bit bigger, another shot swapped out, a logo shifted by a centimeter. The price for each revision beyond the agreed-upon number is something you need to discuss with the client before the project even begins. In My Rates, you set the default; in the Budget Planner, you simply enter the number of extra revisions.
Production costs: Sometimes you can’t handle a project on your own. You need to hire an external sound engineer, a lighting technician, order catering, pay for location rental, or purchase licensed music. That’s what the Production Costs section is for — you can put everything there so you don’t have to cover these expenses out of your own pocket.
Discounts and rush fees: Discounts are common — whether for regular clients or package deals. But it works the other way around, too. When someone comes to you on Friday at 5 p.m. saying, “Dude, this has to be up on the website by Sunday morning,” it means you’ll be working through the weekend and late into the night. That’s when you apply a Rush Fee (express surcharge) without a second thought — for example, +20% of the total project cost.
Output: PDF for the client, CSV for the accountant
Once you’ve entered everything correctly, the app will generate a clear summary. No more chaotic calculations on a calculator or rewriting in Word.
You can immediately export the result in two formats:
- PDF for the client: It looks professional, is clean, structured, and transparent. The client can clearly see what they’re paying for (labor, equipment, post-production), which minimizes unnecessary price negotiations.
- CSV for the accountant: An export that your accountant (or you, if you’re cleaning up your desk at the end of the month) can import into Excel and immediately filter, enter into a tax return, or use to check cash flow.
Conclusion
Budget Planner is one of those tools where I learned the most from my own mistakes during development — from projects where I underestimated myself, from clients where I didn’t have clear rules for revisions, from days when I came home with an invoice that didn’t even cover gas.
It’s not about having a fancy app. It’s about being able to give the client a number with confidence—and knowing where that number comes from.
Filmari is an iOS app for filmmakers that covers the entire project lifecycle — from brainstorming through the shot list and technical script to the packing plan, shooting days, and, of course, budget planning.
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