How to Search This Secure Database

The Online Searchable Database of Actual Prices
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How to Search This Secure Database
Country Screen
Since this is a worldwide database of prices, and we are continuing to collect price points from all over the world, you MUST select a country within which to search. Once you have a country selected, click on NEXT. If the country you selected includes states, then this action takes you to the "Select a State" screen. (Otherwise you will go directly to the "City & Category" screen.)

State Screen
This is an optional action just in case you want to get a listing of ALL the prices in the country for a specific service. For most, however, a state would be selected here to reduce the number of cities displayed in the "city select" window on the next screen.

City & Category Screen
This is the main search screen. Here you select the specific city for your research. Or you leave this drop down window alone and go directly to select a Category in a state-wide search. The categories are: Camera/Film, Design, Finishing, Input, Multimedia, Other, Output, Prepress, Production, Software Services, and Web Services (the search engine lists them alphabetically).

The Camera/Film category is where you'll find digital photography, photo enhancement, photo editing, photo enhancement, photo manipulation, photo restoration, and photo retouching.

Under Design, you'll find graphic design, illustration, cartooning, advertising, brochures, newsletters, and so on. We put the word "Design" in front of the subcategory headings to make it easier for you to select design of newsletters and not newsletter production (since some companies have a different price for design than they do for DTP layout).

Finishing covers the binding, collating, folding, stamping, and stuffing functions that occur after printing has been accomplished.

Input refers to those things that are done before design begins. This includes writing, editing, proofreading, translation, transcription, scanning (including OCR scanning), file conversions and the like.

Multimedia includes animation, audio and video services, multimedia services, video services, and CD-ROM services. There is a separate listing for animation under Web Services.

Other is a catch-all category that includes admin support, database maintenance, event planning, mailing services, project management, research services, spreadsheet support, and virtual services.

Output refers to copying and printing. Here's where you'll find b/w and color copying and printing. The listings here typically cover outputs from one to 100 copies.

Prepress covers color correction, image editing, retouching, imagesetting, and other services.

Production is a category that primarily covers publishing (database publishing, desktop publishing, e-books), desktop presentations, and CD/DVD production.

Software Services has prices for most the popular software programs used in both print and electronic publishing. Even HTML, Java, and C++ will be found here. So will Pagemaker, InDesign QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, CorelDraw and many other applications.

Web Services covers web site design and development. It's a huge category and one that is growing the largest. Most graphic designers and desktop publishers are also selling web design, so we are finding a lot of prices for web design and development. Here you'll find site design, site updating, web databases, and web search engine optimization.

(JOB PRICES) is a special category (actually listed first) that contains over 4,900 jobs. Each job is described here with the actual invoice payments. Here's what service providers received for work. Some of the jobs listed include writing, data entry, book covers, databases, e-commerce, site design, various size websites, Web 2.0, and WordPress services.

Service / Detail 1 / Detail 2
These subcategories are used to further refine your search. For example, if you're looking for web databases, you could select "Web Services - web databases" and get a per each price for this work. You don't have to select all of the three available subcategories, but they are there when you want to get specific and refine your search.

Units
This is a critical search criteria since there are various ways to price an output or a service (each, page, hour, scan, sheet, etc.). If you don't specify a unit, you could get some pretty strange Minimum, Maximum and Average results.

Results Screen
This screen will show that you searched for this category and specified this unit (e.g., per hour) in this city, state and country.

Then it will list the total number of prices found, the minimum price, maximum price and average price based on your search criteria. Below this results overview you'll find a detailed list showing each specific price point found. (A price point is simply a unique price associated with a product or service. Each service in each company has an associated price point. Web site design at $75 an hour in XYZ Company represents one price point among the many.)

Wherever we could, we included additional information about the company behind each price point. In the "comments" field you could find, date the company started, type of business, and number of employees. If there are many price points for the criteria defined in your search, you'll see a "next page" button at the bottom of the Results screen to link to the next page in the detail results listing. This enables you to study each and every price point found based on the search criteria that you selected.

Error Messages
The most common message says that:

"You searched for ...... in ......

We are sorry, but no records matched your search."

What this means is that your search criteria wasn't specified well enough to let the search engine find what you seek. Perhaps you were searching for Java scripting under Design (it's under Software Services). It could be that we just haven't gotten to that city or state to enter prices in the criteria you selected. We have over 100,000 prices in this database, and we are collecting and processing around 400 prices each day. Thus we have a HUGE task ahead of us. We're working on it, but it takes time. We try to focus on data entry for those states in which we have a lot of subscribers. But be patient, we'll get to all the data as soon as we can.

Still Stuck?
Send us an email. This is the quickest way to get a response from our research team. You could call us (858-538-0093) and speak to someone here, but with most of us deep in the vaults of our pricing warehouse, they don't let us out much. So we'd likely have to call back. Email is the preferable way to communicate with us.

We hope this tutorial is helpful. If you have suggestions, we'd love to see them. Real Prices Confidential was designed by those who use the data regularly. It's consistently being improved. And we are always open to your ideas for making this pricing resource even better.

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Information Line:		(858) 538-0093
Orders:		(800) 811-4337
e-mail information:		brenner @ brennerbooks . com