Don’t you hate calculating budgets? There are never strict guidelines on how to do that in terms of a particular project. With ordered 3D animation or any art form services, you always risk to either overpay a service provider and ‘enjoy’ the mediocre results or overpay them, undermining your financial stability for nothing. Medical animation isn’t an exception.
Let’s Define the Most Proper Scope of Expenses
We’ve already highlighted in our previous article that your goals and requirements concerning any ordered form of content, assets, or services should be:
- Clear-worded;
- Based on the main strategic company objectives;
- Measurable by the appropriate indicators;
- Time-limited;
- Monitored with key performance indicators.
With that in mind, ask yourself a question – which KPIs are you looking to achieve with your ordered animation?
- To encourage partnerships and collaborations?
- To acquire investor financing?
- To increase the number of sales?
- To increase the average size of sales?
- To improve the company image?
To get the most optimal cost of medical animation you’re about to pay, research the KPI question and presume the desired ROI (Return on Investment) you wish to get in the long run. And if you believe that the bigger Returns require bigger Investments, I’d beg to differ despite my ‘strictly formal business intentions’.
I am a certified financial analyst and, during my practice, I’ve grown to know everything about ROI. I’ll gladly share my expertise in the next blog post. But right now, let’s ponder on Investment.
There’s a simple method you can use. Just expose the ordered material’s quality and price, and compare the results like in the table below. 
Quality Triangle
To put it briefly, your resources – be it time, money, and other capabilities – are never unlimited. And if you focus on Cost more than on Scope and Time, you automatically neglect Quality and other parameters.
How Much Does It Cost to Produce 60 Seconds of Medical Animation in the US?
Our team has been recently researching the US market to figure out the big picture there. Yeah, we could have bought a readymade analysis report for about $3,000-5,000, but I just don’t trust third parties that much 🙂
So, what we did was that we wrote letters to 45 scientific animation companies operating in the US and European markets asking to develop a 60-second-long 3D animation video. We attached some references and an initial scenario. We also specifically asked for high-quality scientific animation, with detailed, hi-res, proper visualization of molecular-level processes.
We received responses from 23 companies and eventually met with their reps in person to discuss all the details. As a result, we got 14 ballpark estimates. All in all, here’s the summary:
- We received prices from 14 out of the 23 companies we contacted.
- The lowest price for a 60-second video is $6.900
- The highest price for a 60-second explainer video is $50.000
- The average price for a 60-second MoA video is $23.537
We combined all the data into the price distribution chart you can find below:I hope this post gave you an idea of how much you might expect to pay for your next video project. The costs outlined above are certainly not set in stone, all these numbers can cause yet another load of questions. Contact us directly if you got different numbers in your research or if you wish to clarify anything or receive a Quote. I’ll gladly discuss all the specifics!
