Be careful don't make the same mistake I did.

[diverone]

When you buy something, it's nice to know in advance what it will cost. Even if only an estimate is given, is it not reasonable to assume that it will not cost more than twice as much?

True. But I guess it's really difficult to estimate the correct rendering costs for the first frame - for the customer and for PP as well. After the first frame it should be easier to calculate, but in case of a single frame render job, the job is already finished at this point. The current system is 'OK', and as I said, I never paid more than $5 for a single frame. But I would also appreciate a better estimation of the final costs, if that is possible.

There was no cost estimate on when my 0-100 render would be done. I made the mistake of not making sure that it was set at 1:1 single frame, I know this now. I would never drop a car off at an auto shop and leave without ever getting some kind of maximum estimate on what the repairs would cost, I would not take an answer like "We'll let you know how much when we're done..." If I had left the house to go out for a few hours say six hours I might have come back to a 0% progress, 0 frames rendered and a bill of $6,500.00 or even up to over $10,000 USD. That's my estimate on the time it took to reach $211.00 without any frames rendered. Again all I am doing is warning anyone else who may or may know this.

[WAS]

the 'estimated costs' in the PixelPlowAgent are not predicted very well for single frame jobs.

When you buy something, it's nice to know in advance what it will cost. Even if only an estimate is given, is it not reasonable to assume that it will not cost more than twice as much?

This does seem like a legal grey area to me, actually. I'm pretty sure federal trade and consumer laws require the consumer made aware of sales taxes (which must be occurring if this is a business offering a service) before a finalized purchase. And that couldn't be calculated without a total.

We used to offer rendering at the data center I used to work at, and we just did it very simple. The price was based on watt hours, price of the power bill, and use markup. That gave the user a flat usage rate based on 100% load (even if they didn't use that much power) with a markup allowing a final price and tax. Additionally, it was dirt cheap. Huge C4D file would be done in couple hours for 2 bucks. And this was back when we all did that weird abstract explosion stuff in C4D and literally stress tested it with every render.

I imagine there is so much inflation here. Even with my 1000watt PSU and using TG day and night my power bill, including all other PCs, laptops, CRT TVs, lights, fridge, stove, hot water, 2 AC units, and whatever else, was 50 bucks every 2 months soooo.... Lol (Though we do sell California power almost annually so we may have different market)