An honest appearance-design quote breaks into three blocks: the design fee, the prototype fee, and the mold-trial support fee. When a quote shows one lump sum, either the risk is priced into the total, or those stages are simply not included. The second case is the dangerous one, because the money gets paid later, elsewhere, at a worse exchange rate.
Take a desktop smart speaker. A full appearance package runs 24,000 to 36,000 yuan: three directions, two rounds of refinement, A-class surface data, and a CMF specification. Prototypes add 6,000 to 12,000 for two rounds of CNC or 3D printing with surface treatment. Mold-trial support adds 4,000 to 8,000 for two site visits. The total lands between 35,000 and 55,000. A quote under 10,000 usually stops at rendered images, and neither the structural hand-off nor the production responsibility is in the price.
What the design fee actually buys
Not drawings. Rounds of argument. A 10,000 quote gives you three renderings. A 30,000 quote gives you competitor teardowns, brand-tone reasoning, three form directions, two rounds of client review and refinement, A-class surface data, a CMF document, and three rounds of collision with the structural team while the drawing is still soft.
The difference is not sheet count, it is how many times the question "why does this shape work" got answered. In our projects, appearance packages argued through two or more rounds went into tooling with an average of 1.2 mold revisions. Projects that went from rendering straight to tooling averaged 3.4. A mold revision costs 8,000 to 30,000 yuan and two to four weeks.
Why prototypes are a separate line
A prototype is where "looks right" becomes "feels right". The price spread, 1,500 to 8,000 per set, is almost entirely surface treatment: paint, plating, texture transfer. The first round exists to expose problems that no screen shows: button feel, the visual weight of a seam, interference when the hand grips the part.
Bundling prototypes into the design fee is possible, but ask how many rounds are included. The industry default is one. Everything after that is billed separately, and a comparison that ignores this is not a comparison.
The line everyone cuts
Mold-trial support is a designer standing at the tooling shop during T0 and T1: sink marks, weld-line routing, the appearance of the parting line. Those decisions take ten minutes on site and three days over photographs. Without this line in the quote, a trial problem leaves two outcomes: the client referees a fight between the molder and the design firm, or pays extra for an improvised fix. What the two visits cost is usually smaller than the mold revision they prevent.
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