Re: How to charge clients for long-term edit storage

I think you need to present them with options at the start of the project, not after.

Better to just buy a drive and add it to their bill, I say, than to try to (from their standpoint) milk them forever with monthly storage charges.

It's about perception: buying a drive that you can turn over to them at any point, and charging it to the immediate project, it's really just like charging for the videotape or other commodities, directly associated to the work at hand. They probably won't blink, especially if they know that drive belongs to them and you are just holding it. You can frame it that they can have the drive on demand, or if they sign off, you can credit their account for 80 percent of the drive cost, wipe the drive, and use it for another client.

(Which will cause them to call you 24 hours later to ask for one more change to the huge project you just erased; it never fails.)

But, if you're essentially charging them rent to store their footage month-to-month, they see no "value-added" to that, just an ongoing cost. They won't care that that drive saves them many hours of expense from re-digitizing or whatever. They can't relate to deferred or avoided costs in their world, only actual costs. They'd rather buy replacement hardware when something breaks, than pay maintenance contracts, and they see you the same way. They will rather just gamble that it won't be needed. And to them, if they lose the bet, either the change to the project is worth the added costs, or it isn't, the fact they would be making you do a lot of drudgery in re-creating lost assets is not even on their radar. Especially for internal projects within an organization, like a corporate in-house shop. In-house processes are of little interest to most clients.

One other way to look at this: when they call for a change: you can undercut the competition's hours on the same job because you were smart and saved all the elements. The competition has to start from scratch, so their bid will be based on more hours. You can offer what looks like a discount, and nit be out anything, if you kept the elements. Of course, if these clients are weasels, nothing prevents them from taking their drive they paid for, with all the elements, and handing that off to your competitor, either... but I think few clients figure that out, and if you give great service, it shouldn't ever occur to them to do so.

That's just my own opinion.