Since the beginning of our operation, thousands of people have used our service. Many of those people received what they were looking for, but some did not. We strive for 100% success through automation and documentation, but there is always potential for things to not work as expected. In those failure events, we hope to set your expectations properly as regards what we are providing to you.
From a simplistic perspective, Pixel Plow provides CPU’s. Of course, for those CPU’s to be useful to you, they have to be running software. That’s why we have made efforts to support more software than any other render farm service on the planet. A quick survey indicates we are leading on that front.
Now, it would be easy for the customer to assume we are providing rendered results, but that’s not exactly true. The reason we can’t provide that is because we’re not creating the scene files you submit. We’re also not hand-holding your job through the various phases of rendering to correct problems for you. Our render farm is largely a self-service offering, with quite a bit of automation (help) along the way to prevent some problems. That means that you, the customer, are ultimately responsible for the rendered results.
We can gather from the above that Pixel Plow, since it is providing CPU’s over time, charges for compute time. The monetary charge for compute time must stand whether the rendered results are what you, the customer, expect or not. Obviously, we don’t charge people in the scenarios where our system or software caused problems, but the remainder of the situations are chargeable. You see, compute time is a consumable resource. It’s like food or gasoline. Once consumed, resources of that nature can not be returned to the vendor for a refund. You can’t take broccoli back to the grocery store because you ate it and didn’t like how it tasted. You can’t take gasoline back to the gas station because you used it to drive to New Jersey and then realized you don’t like New Jersey (no offense to those who like New Jersey). In the same way, you can’t return compute time to us if it was used to render a result you don’t like. Unless you’ve invented a time machine, we can’t get compute time back.
This is why we charge what we charge and the way we charge. Of course we want all of our customer jobs to create output they expect and want…all for the price they desire, but that utopia is not yet achievable. In the meantime, we continue charging for compute time as the consumable resource that it is. We trust you understand this reality and are willing to work with it. Let your expectations be set accordingly.
