How do you price Full Color Digital?

Do you use a price list?

An estimating program? If so, which one...

Do you calculate your price via a click cost or BHR or flat rate?

How do you charge for finishing and paper?

Do you have house stocks or order your paper?

You don't have to post your actual costs, just how you price your work, unless your prices are published and considered public.

Thanks!

Good day.
We are located in Russia and, I suppose, that fact only will greatly affect our pricing methods, comparing to business in Europe/US.
Anyway.

Our current digital printing equipment is a single Canon 3200 (which we are looking to replace right now with imagePress C1 or 4040 model, by the way). But we have a bigger machines in our city, like iGen, and they all use almost exactly the same system.

We use a price-list, which starts around 1USD for 1A3 in full-color and the price gradually comes down around 0.66USD for 100A3 in full-color. That pricing is for the clients "from the street", as we say.

For corporate and established clients we go with additional discounts, and usually, for them, pricing is around 0.66USD for A3 in full-color and size of the print-job doesn't matter - it could be one single page or a 100+ page run. With that type of clients, it is the total amount of monthly volume that matters.

Finishing alone is a very big discussion, not only because there are great number of jobs and methods, but also because some clients get some finishing for free, while for others it costs almost like print job or even more. Don't know if it is possible to describe all the finishing pricing methods in one single post.

And, for conclusion, I don't of any actual usage of time-pricing business methods in Russia in full-color digital, even with really big machines.

p.s. sorry for english, don't have much of a practice.
great forum, by the way, hope it will develop - there are very few places like that.

Your English is fantastic, don't worry about that.

Thanks for the information, nice to see other countries represented. What are the typical jobs you folks printing in Russia.

Typical jobs are business cards, and I can say - that type of job is primary business-maker on all kinds of digitial printing equipment here (even iGen, maybe HP Indigo is a bit different in such matter).
Second priority is advertising booklets of various kind.

And, despite expectations, variable data printing is not very common. It's not very rare either, but I can say, that type of service is not making any noticeable profit here. Don't know why, really. And I'm not alone in this - every serious ditial printing machine sold here goes with an advertising like "variabel data printing is a key to success", or something like that, but it seems that there's just no such market in here.
Maybe all the variable data printing jobs goes to b/w machines or it is simply concentrated in real big cities only, I don't really know.

I've said that much of variable data printing because I've read a number of posts here and amount of that specifics jobs amazed me, really. We've never had anything even close to this.

Thanks for the info. Out of curiousity, what are the typical wages for someone running a digital printing device in your area? I'm curious to here what, if any, difference in wages in Russia vs US for a similar skill set.

That is surprising about VI jobs, but I have to admit the same thing is true with most of our customers. We do a lot of VI, but it still hasn't gotten to the day to day typical "walk-in" customers. But it is gaining momentum.

Look forward to finding more info about digital printing in Russia.

We are primarily an offset shop, having added digital color in the form of two NexPress 2500's recently. We decided to sidestep the Kinko's type of walk-in business and go after programs, and did this by setting a minimum price for any job of $250. Basically, any job that we estimate for less than $250 will cost $250. That price includes prep, proof, paper, print, trim and package only. Additional finishing/bindery costs apply, as does delivery.

Our general pricing starts at $0.45 per side/ 8.5 x 11 page size, and drops a little for two-sided or larger formats to factor out redundant paper charges. For regular customers, we routinely discount from that number as far as we need to go, down to maybe $0.18 or so for larger repeat programs.