We’ve had many conversations with artists, directors, managers, and more in the 3D industry. It was obvious early on that most animation studios felt that they had to have a render farm in-house. The reasons for this position varied, as some cited performance issues/needs, others claimed security as paramount, and still more broke everything down to the raw dollar cost of outsourcing while waving fingers at our competition. As we have already dealt with the performance, feature set, security, and privacy concerns in relation to using a render farm service, the only bastion left standing was the almighty price debate. As it turns out, though, there is no bastion. It’s a sink-hole, if anything.
When asked about how much it costs to run their render farm, artists would simply shrug. Directors would say that’s something for the accounting department to figure out. Managers typically didn’t know any real numbers, but were quick to say it’s just part of the cost of doing 3D business. No one, it seemed, really had the desire to even begin a comparison to a render farm service. Maybe they were too afraid of what they’d find?
Enter our new render farm TCO spreadsheet.
It slices, it dices, and it can tell you what your render farm is costing you in the same Ghz-hr format that Pixel Plow uses charge its customers. I’m sure you’re thinking that we just made up a bunch of numbers to artificially inflate private render farm costs while making our service look good. A quick glance at our spreadsheet, however, and you’ll think again. We want a very clear apples to apples comparison.
We take several items as inputs, definable by you based on your local costs or needs, and fully automate the process of cooking that down to a single Ghz-hr number. Items we take as inputs are: local power costs, local sales tax rates, hardware lifecycles, facility amortization time periods, local building costs, IT staff costs, software licensing, node count and type, and more. This enables you, our soon to be customer, to prove for yourself that we truly are cheaper to use than your internal render farm.
We understand that computing these values is time-consuming, which is most likely why very few people ever even try. Consider yourself invited to save time now, by using our spreadsheet, and money later, by using our online render farm services. We’re not hiding the math, so please contact us so we can get you a copy of the render farm TCO spreadsheet today. Here’s a static snapshot of what’s inside:
Seriously, do your budget a favor and have an honest price comparison today. Using Pixel Plow enables you to create your art without having to worry about creating and maintaining the technical infrastructure. In short, you do what you’re good at, while we do what we do best.
