What he said… 

tmblg:

Nostrich said:

Wow, lots of buzz around Tumblize today. Those guys that, for just $999 will supply you with a brand new theme for your tumblelog. No, seriously, it’s just $999. For a one-page design. Oh, and it was something like $500 last time I looked, which means I must really have underestimated how stupid people are.

We’ve been getting a lot of flack regarding our $999 price point over at Tumblize. This guy has been especially hard on us. We hadn’t IE bug tested a couple of the Tumblogs we’ve done in the past - which is admittedly a major oversight - but I’ll point out that almost every theme we’ve done so far has been for friends or ourselves. I’m sure this doesn’t come off as being very professional to the casual onlooker, but any paid work we’ve done were fully bug tested and bullet-proofed (check out The Human Giant’s Tumblr). Anyway, I sent Richard (a.k.a. Numblr) a quick note about our pricing:

I saw your post about Tumblize and wanted to explain our reasoning behind the pricing. Originally, we were going to charge $499, but after running the numbers we realized it just doesn’t make it worth our while to ask for that price. Yes, you absolutely can get a tumblog created for less, but in our experience the actual working hours required for a designer add up quickly. We definitely aren’t for everyone - I understand that most Tumblr users don’t have $1,000 lying around - but that’s okay. We’d rather make three great themes each month that we can focus our full attention on than producing a bunch of crappy rush jobs.

I understand that $1,000 is a hard pill to swallow, but we brought together a solid team of professional designers and XHTML/CSS developers and, after running the numbers, a $999 price point ensures everyone goes home happy. You will always be able to find people like Cameron and Bill that will do it for less - and do it well - but I think we’re catering to a totally different crowd.

Why $999?

I don’t think a lot of people realize what goes into making the type of themes that we plan to create. This is totally new to us, and we will probably be able to streamline the process and hope to reduce costs over time, but we believe that $999 makes sense. On a project like the Human Giant we logged about 13 hours after design, revisions (after client feedback), XHTML/CSS templating and IE bug testing, which works out to an hourly rate of about $75. People seem to forget what we are talking about: a completely original design and XHTML/CSS template, as well as revisions at the mercy of the client. We are also hosting all the images and theme files on our servers indefinitely as Tumblr doesn’t host anything past the HTML and have invested a significant amount of money in building a Rails back-end to manage new jobs, payments and Basecamp API integration. We’ve assembled a really great team of people - all of whom are freelance designers - and as designers ourselves (who are often low-balled) we want to make sure that everyone is fairly compensated for their work. Like anything, you’re always going to be able to find someone who can do things cheaply. Personally, I don’t think there’s a huge distinction between designing a Tumblr theme and say, designing a WordPress blog or a personal website for somebody. Like anything, you’ll always be able to find a student or enthusiast to create something on the cheap, but we’re offering a professional service and charging accordingly.