What is a low- or no-budget project?

A project can be marked as low- or no- budget if:

• The voice seeker posts the project and marks it as “low- or no-budget project”; or…
• The Voice123 Team, when reviewing a project for its approval, determines that the budget is below the industry median as described by the talent-voice producers in their survey answers (check the industry averages for non-union projects for more info).

Please note that in some rare instances the decision of marking a project a low- or no-budget may be highly subjective, some people may not agree, and may include low budget reasoning such as 'equipment costs for ISDN' or requests for finished tracks with library music, and editing cost. The rates provided by talents are set by talents, based on their business needs and/or desire.

The reasoning Voice123 does not allow talents and voice producers to determine the minimum budgets are found below (warning, technical jargon may follow):

When a project is set in Voice123 the budget field is not a fixed number, like “400” or “10”. It is actually an open text field that may include numbers and letters. For example: “400 – 500”, “5 per word”, “500”, or “120/hour”. Why? Some projects may be open-ended, some other projects may have a range for their budgets, some budgets may offer royalties, etc.

Now, let’s suppose we allowed John, a voice over talent, to mark on his profile that he doesn’t want to be matched with projects paying less than USD 300. Current computer technology is not capable of determining if “300” is more or less than “5 per word”, “400 – 500”, or “120/hour”. As such, our system may not properly determine if John really wanted to be invited or not to those projects.

In theory we could come up with questionnaires and formulas to do the math, but unfortunately they would be too complex (at least for now) to be practical.