been doing commercial work for about two years now, mostly real estate and some construction progress stuff, and the thing that kills me every single time is revisions. i deliver the footage, client says looks great, then three days later they want the music changed or they want a different clip order or they want to cut 10 seconds from the middle and suddenly im back in premiere for another hour on a job i thought was closed.

i dont have anything in my contracts about revision limits, which i know is probably the main issue. but even when i bring it up with clients they kind of get weird about it like im being difficult. how do you guys handle this? do you have like a set number of revisions baked into your price and then charge after that? or do you just build it into your rate and accept that revisions are part of the deal? curious what's actually working for people in practice not just in theory.

yeah this took me a while to figure out. i now include one round of revisions in my base price and anything after that is a flat $75 per revision session. i put it right in the contract and honestly most clients dont even blink at it, i think it actually makes you look more professional not less. the key thing i found is framing it in the proposal before the job starts, not after you deliver. if you bring it up after delivery it feels like a gotcha, if its in the original agreement its just how you work.

the music thing specifically is so common. i started asking clients to approve a music track before i even finish the edit so i dont end up recutting to a different song. adds like one extra email to the process and saves so much pain later.

honestly i just build a buffer into my rate and treat one revision as included and anything beyond that i deal with on a case by case basis. probably not the most business savvy approach but most of my clients are repeat customers so i dont want to nickel and dime them. construction clients especially, i'd rather keep that relationship smooth. but for one off jobs yeah probably smarter to have it in writing. i use a pretty basic contract template i found through AUVSI and just edited it a bit, might be worth looking at if you dont have somehting formal yet