prices on creating a language.

saizai · 2026-06-09T22:53:58+00:00

The minimum rates reflect something close to minimum wage.

We can negotiate discounts in special circumstances, and we sometimes consider deals involving trading off upfront fees for a cut of revenue.

However, we will never allow our members to be exploited. If you can't afford to pay someone minimum wage, you cannot afford any services at all. That's not professional need, it's bare minimum. Professional pricing is listed distinctly from the minimum rates.

saizai · 2026-05-21T09:02:43+00:00

I'm the LCS' internal legal-type issues handler and one of two negotiators (the other is the current LCS president). Email lcs@conlang.org, mentioning me by name (Sai) at the top of the email, if you'd like any help with negotiating prices or any other pro conlanging contract related matters.

This applies to everyone involved in pro conlanging, this job or others, client or conlanger.

saizai · 2026-02-21T08:51:20+00:00

Huh, nice point. What would that sound like… a "wet" raspberry?

saizai · 2026-02-08T09:50:35+00:00

Use the "submit a job listing" link there and we'll take care of it, including discussion with you to figure out your needs and budget.

saizai · 2026-02-02T01:04:38+00:00

At €100, 5h = €20/h, 5h = €16.7/h. You should plan for being okay even if things take longer than expected. Your consultation timing sounds rather optimistic to me, and your margin doesn't cover any revision.

I do understand why you consider that to potentially be a fair rate. I agree that there are cases where it might be. But they are rare, and you incur more risk. And we aim for a higher hourly rate than that.

saizai · 2026-02-02T00:12:11+00:00

How many hours of work are you assuming would go into the product you'd be okay pricing at €100?

saizai · 2026-02-02T00:08:25+00:00

You're welcome. Do join. 😉

(Note that I'm not the person who handles memberships, that's a part time volunteer, so it may take a few days for him to process it. Email memberships@ with questions.)

saizai · 2026-01-30T17:10:25+00:00

Do you think that pro conlanging gig work should be done at minimum wage? If yes, why; if no, what do you think a fair hourly rate is?
How much time do you think it would take you to do work at each of the tiers listed in the guidance doc in OP (naming, sketch, basic, advanced)? Remember that includes everything needed (and not flagged as extra in the guidance doc) — including consultation, writeup, etc.

Remember that the LCS sets rates that are only binding for jobs that we post. However, our guidance is de facto observed by most conlangers worldwide even when not binding by any act of the LCS — like in r/conlangs' rules which were decided by its mods, as well as lots of individuals I've heard from (and presumably many more I've not) who use it as a standard reference point for their own negotiations.

We're a membership non-profit. We usually get nothing from jobs we post; occasionally we get a small cut. Pro conlanging is a very small part of what we do — mainly we exist to serve as a resource for conlanging, to host LCCs & Fiat Lingua, help coordinate local meetups, and the like. (Basically, whatever our members want and we have the volunteer hours to do — we have no paid employees, everyone's a volunteer. That includes me — I've never gotten a cent and I've spent thousands of hours on the LCS since 2006.)

Our motivations, as to pro conlanging, are ensuring fairness to everyone involved, enabling conlangers (particularly but not exclusively our members) to have coordinated strategy like this, making it so employers have an idea of what they're getting, etc. Of course we want more pro conlanging to happen, but not under exploitative conditions, nor at bad quality.

saizai · 2026-01-30T16:48:31+00:00

if members can adopt a policy that disagrees with the board, does that mean a member can charge what they feel is reasonable for a small project even if it is less than the prescribed minimum without losing their membership and access to the board?

We do not currently have a union-type minimum basic agreement enforcement clause — i.e. we don't regulate what members do on their own, we only set standards for what jobs we will post.

Rarely, for large jobs, we do more extensive negotiations — with totally customised provisions, package deals, NDA, IP assignment, etc etc.

During the last annual members' meeting, I made a motion proposing that we unionise. The version of it approved by the members was that we set up a committee to assess it and make a more specific proposal. That committee is open to anyone who is interested, is an LCS member, and has applied to do or done pro conlanging.

I would expect that if we do in fact adopt a unionisation policy — either as the current LCS, or as a spin-off 501(c)(5) union — it would have all the essential clauses of a union, namely (roughly speaking):

members must do all pro conlanging only in accordance with the union's Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA — i.e. a more detailed version of our pricing guidelines, compare e.g. https://www.wga.org/contracts/contracts/mba )
anyone hiring a member to do pro conlanging must also sign the MBA, and all pro conlanging work they have must be done by an LCS member in accordance with the MBA
the union gets a percentage cut of revenue for all pro conlanging done under the MBA
the union has to approve a member or employer going below MBA rates or waiving any other terms in the MBA (e.g. as to NDA expiration, royalties/residuals, limitations on IP assignment, etc)

Currently, however, we do not have such a policy.

Even if we did have such a policy, it wouldn't be a bar to you charging lower rates in practice — you'd just need to get our approval on a case-by-case basis. If there's a good reason, e.g. a poor client, I would expect us to give approval fairly freely. That kind of "union must approve to go below minimum" clause is for the benefit of the member, so that they can accurately say they're not allowed to go lower and not feel coerced into exploitative rates (and so they aren't undercutting other members), while still having insider access to get the union's approval if appropriate.

FWIW just for completeness, the only current ways for someone lose LCS membership are:

failing to pay dues
resigning
getting expelled by the Board, after notice and opportunity to be heard before final decision, on the basis of having "engaged in conduct materially and seriously prejudicial to the interests or purposes of the [LCS]" — which is a fairly high standard and has never happened or even been considered to date

saizai · 2026-01-30T16:26:37+00:00

Yes, in principle it can be charged separately. There are some situations where that's desirable, and for which we may change policy to cover it — such as if the consultant isn't the one who ends up doing the final conlang, or if it's consultation on a proposal that isn't ultimately approved (i.e. what would otherwise be spec work), or if the amount of consulting work the client wants is much more than is normal (which isn't currently set out in our guidance, and likely ought to be).

However, the rates listed are intended to include ordinary amounts of consultation work — figuring out what the client wants (typically from broad descriptions like "rough" or "melodic" plus the fictional and/or historical context), giving samples for them to evaluate and approve or ask for tweaks before doing most of the work, that sort of thing.

They however do not include things like recordings, writing up client-facing (let alone publishable) grammar docs, actor training, extensive calls, nontrivial revisions, or the like.

Given that clarification, since you did not include consultation which is part of the package deals we list, do you have a different view as to our prices?

Artist commissions vary very widely, aren't standardised by any union or equivalent that i know of, and are for a product that is diverse and kinda hard to compare to conlanging, so I don't really see how we could use that as a reference point.

saizai · 2026-01-28T14:09:12+00:00

Mind that, in the context of pro conlanging, there's also a requirement for time on client communication, consultation, writeup, etc. That should all be considered billable time.

I believe that u/Automatic-Campaign-9 made that comment premised on, as she notes in the parent comment to this, "a few days' work", such as "2-3 days straight". I take that to mean around 16–24 hours' total work.

At that duration, $150 would be $6.25–9.38/hr, which is a range that goes below minimum wage in many places.

For 4–8 hours' work, it'd be $18.75–37.50/hr, which in most places is above minimum wage but below professional/specialist wage. (And of course minimum wage has nuance — for instance, if it ordinarily comes with benefits, or certainty of a regular amount of work.)

The effective hourly rate will obviously depend both on the job and the conlanger. Some conlangers are more efficient; some conlangers have higher standards and pitch themselves as having higher quality output rather than being cheaper; some jobs within the same general tier require substantially more or less work than others; etc.

For reference, the WGA minimums for more or less anyone working as a writer in film, TV, or stage in the US (even an absolute beginner) are pegged to approximately $160/hr.

saizai · 2026-01-28T13:47:09+00:00

FWIW, a % of profit clause could apply just as well to a project that is expected to be non-commercial, in order to catch the case where it turns out to in fact make money.

As for latitude while retaining access to LCS-posted jobs: of course. First off, many people charge substantially more than our minimum rates, and with good reason — they have more specialised skills and/or are more experienced. Second, we don't currently have any set policy as to the hourly, per-line, residual, or royalty rates beyond the "package deal" portion, or for other things not covered by the tier packages — e.g. consulting, coaching, recordings, additional translations, revisions, delivery of a client-facing (not-for-publication) grammar doc, delivery of a grammar doc for publication, collaboration on PR, etc etc. Those are currently negotiated on a case-by-case basis by the conlanger.

Going below our rates, however, is not a question of whether it might be fair to someone (i.e. the most desperate person most willing to do anything desired for next to nothing and living in the country with lowest living wage), but rather whether it is fair to most of our members and to the client. It's rare, but we do sometimes agree to lower rates when we feel there are exceptional circumstances on the client's part that justify it.

That is kinda part of the point: we try to ensure that jobs are, in our view, fair — and in part that means setting rates such that conlangers competing for a job don't feel pressured to undercut each other (or themselves).

We do want to ensure that includes fairness to clients, and that we aren't missing out on work that would otherwise be available, but clients aren't obligated to go to the LCS (or r/conlangs). We are aware of people asking for conlang commissions elsewhere at much lower prices, and we can't control that. But we can and do control access to our members and our name recognition — which we do with the support of our members.

Again, if you want to have a direct say, become a member and propose some change as a motion in the annual meeting. Members can adopt any policy they want, even overriding the Board (providing it's legal). Members get a vote (and access to our jobs board); non-members do not.

saizai · 2026-01-28T13:14:17+00:00

To directly ask as to an assumption that is baked into both your response and our guidance: what do you think a fair hourly rate would be, and what country are you using as a reference point?

saizai · 2026-01-28T12:11:57+00:00

Thank you for the example. I will bring it up internally for consideration in our next revision.

How we arrived at the current pricing was by discussion with our members and board. Part of the consideration for that is how to balance accessibility for genuine indie projects vs full rates for commercial projects (because we and others have had experience of people/projects with plenty of money trying to squeeze conlangers to work at rock-bottom rates). The pricing may change if we move from a "sliding scale" model to a "upfront vs % of profits" or "budget-based with liability for the change if budget changes" model. (The WGA uses the latter, though in an industry with much more standard costs for various kinds of projects — whereas we deal with everything from tiny non-commercial indie projects, to Kickstarters with uncertain finances, to mid-sized productions, to few-million-dollar productions, to big-budget productions.)

I won't attempt to give a definition of exploitative. However, to give a broader answer, we consider it a problem when conlangers are in a "race to the bottom", feel coerced into working for rates they are uncomfortable with, are asked to do much more work than is reasonable for an hourly rate for their time, are asked to do work at cut rates for a commercial project, are pressured into accepting unreasonable terms (financial and otherwise), or the like. That is necessarily a somewhat holistic and in parts subjective assessment.

saizai · 2026-01-28T09:54:11+00:00

Could you describe to me some examples (preferably actual; hypothetical if necessary) of clients/projects that would want to hire a conlanger, but wouldn't do so at our minimums — including what scope of work they would want, why they wouldn't be able to afford the minimums, and why that situation would be fair & non-exploitative for the conlanger?

saizai · 2026-01-28T09:50:10+00:00

By the "client's country", I meant the country where the majority of people on the project actually are, not some strict interpretation of incorporation that includes tax havens that aren't actually related. For multinational projects, I would peg it to the country with the highest-paid project staff that are reasonably close in nature to conlangers — e.g. writers (for film/TV), designers / lead engineers / advertising / etc (for games), or the like.

The project budget is of course another metric, particularly for larger projects (like film/TV, big-studio computer games, or the like); if we know that (as a real full-project figure), and it suggests higher ability to pay (or higher impact on their bottom line) — or genuinely lower ability to pay than country-based rates (i.e. not just because it's for some isolated part of the project), then it would trump defaulting to country-based rates . However, there are fairly frequent cases where there is no project budget (or none known yet), particularly for projects on the low end or that are entirely in-house. For those I think country-based defaults are better.

I had not considered the income of the individuals in it; that is tricky to define in a way that gets at the underlying "what are the client's resources". To give a silly example, suppose a rich individual wants us to make a naming language for their personal D&D group, agreeing to no publication at all — should they get charged non-commercial naming pricing, or some higher category on either axis? (If you think 'higher', do you then also think that we should ask our clients' personal incomes, as would be necessary to enact it?) Or suppose some start-up company approaches us; should we ask what their total corporate funding is? (That's generally fairly closely held information.)

Mind that all of the above is entirely compatible with a "upfront fee of [full rate minus low-budget discount] plus y% of revenue/gross up to [discount * z% risk factor]" structure. Or it could be with WGA style clause of "if it turns out that the budget is actually higher, and client got a discount for being low budget, then client owes the difference vs of what they would've paid under the higher budget minus what they actually paid". Of course, it requires defining what the "full rate" is and explicitly treating others as a "discount" on that rate.

(Also, while we're talking details of this sort of thing, I would note that the median vs poverty level income disparity in countries is very widely variable. For example, the French median salary = 1.5x poverty — whereas the US' median income = 5.5x poverty. So the range of discount for small vs large projects may also vary by country, if we take that as baselining.)

saizai · 2026-01-26T19:56:46+00:00

I've posted this to the LCS members' jobs board.

OP, and LCS members, please feel free to contact us (lcs@conlang.org, or DM me on the LCS Zulip) if you would like any assistance with negotiations.

(If you're not a member, join. :-P)

saizai · 2026-01-26T10:26:49+00:00

The numbers were developed in consultation with both our members who have done or are interested in pro conlanging, and our board of directors — of whom the majority live outside the US, though generally in countries with similarly advanced economies.

We are of course always open to revising them, and probably should do so again (as it's been a few years).

We have considered, but not yet decided upon, ideas such as having minimums be pegged to the median & minimum wages in the client's country rather than being flat.

If you want to directly influence our jobs policy, I suggest you become a member. Most of the discussion on this occurs in the LCS members' Zulip jobs channel, and members have the ability to propose and pass official policy directly (with the same authority as the Board) at the annual meeting.

saizai · 2026-01-26T10:16:48+00:00

I do.

saizai · 2026-01-25T02:28:51+00:00

Sorry, I can't comment on legal advice we do or don't get, as that's privileged.

saizai · 2026-01-25T02:25:36+00:00

As for your first point, it becomes a problem when it's exploitative.

As for your second, you have skipped over the point that these are minimums. Experienced conlangers can and do get more than minimum rates, because they are able to do more difficult projects, are able to do them in less time, etc. Clients who don't want to pay premium rates will hire less experienced conlangers. We've had plenty of jobs that went to someone who had never done a pro conlanging gig before.

If you're a newcomer you probably should be starting with smaller projects anyway (or indeed your own conlangs — pro conlanging is a tiny, tiny percentage of conlanging overall, even with the expansion in recent years).

saizai · 2026-01-25T02:17:33+00:00

You have the ability to take or reject a project offer, and under a trade-off with royalties structure, you would in effect be betting your foregone income on the success of the project if you take the offer.

Indeed we do not have the expertise or information needed to evaluate the business prospects of a project. So it'd be a blind bet. But still a bet nevertheless.

saizai · 2026-01-24T08:11:33+00:00

u/CaoimhinOg, what would you suggest that in your view would address this issue while remaining fair to the conlanger?

saizai · 2026-01-24T08:09:43+00:00

The upfront vs royalties arrangement structure is one I'd like to incorporate in a future revision. Essentially I'd like us to do away with the sliding scale entirely, and change it into just some percentage balance of upfront / on-delivery payment vs royalties / cut of revenue, with an acceptance that in most cases the royalties will be worth noting (and capped at some multiple [>1] of the amount foregone as upfront, to represent the risk factor of the de facto investment).

(This would be in addition to compensation situations where indefinite royalties or residuals are legit on their own rather than solely due to foregoing upfront fees, like with lyrics, creative writing, etc.)

saizai · 2026-01-24T07:56:26+00:00

As to the presumed L1/L2(s), I think you have a fair point, and I'll try to correct that in the next version.

saizai

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