Why quotes vary so widely
Ask three suppliers to quote for “an e-learning module on working safely with nitrogen” and you get three figures a factor of five apart. That is not because somebody is trying to fleece you. It is because the question carries too little information for everybody to mean the same thing by it.
One supplier reads: text in a template, three knowledge questions, done. Another reads: interviews with operators, scenarios based on incident data, imagery of the client’s own installation, assessment on decision behaviour. Both deliver “a module about nitrogen”. They are simply not doing the same work.
Anyone comparing on price without making that assumption explicit almost always picks the first, and only discovers after delivery that the material does not get used.
The four cost drivers
Practically the whole price difference traces back to four choices.
How specific it is. A generic module on gas detection already exists and costs little. A module about your installation, with your fittings and your reporting route, requires research: a site visit, conversations with specialists, imagery. That is by far the biggest variable, and at the same time the most important, because specificity is exactly what decides whether experienced staff take it seriously.
Which format. Text with images is cheapest. Video demands filming and editing. 3D visualisation demands modelling. VR demands interaction design and testing on hardware on top of that. Each step up is roughly a doubling, and each step is only defensible when the one before it could not do the job.
How many languages. The first language is the most expensive; each one after it costs a fraction of that, provided the material was designed for it. If it was not, language two is nearly as expensive as language one, because everything has to be recorded or shot again.
How deep the assessment goes. Four multiple-choice questions at the end cost almost nothing. Assessment that measures whether somebody takes the right decision in a situation demands scenario design with credible distractors. That is content work, not production work.
What an hourly rate hides
Quotes often come as hours times a rate, which invites comparison on the rate. That is usually the wrong comparison.
The number of hours is largely determined by how much of the thinking sits with you and how much with the supplier. Hand over a worked-out script and the build is cheap. Supply a folder of procedures and the words “make something of this”, and the design work is in the quote, or it is not, in which case you get a module that parrots the procedure.
A lower rate with more hours is not cheaper. And a quote that comes in strikingly low almost always contains an assumption about your contribution that nobody has said out loud.
The question almost nobody asks
Practically every tender is about the build price. Almost never about what it will cost to update it in two years.
That is remarkable, because in industry something always changes: an installation gets extended, a procedure gets tightened, a supplier gets swapped. Material that was not built to be maintained costs a project price at every change, and therefore does not get updated, after which within a few years it convinces nobody.
So ask that question explicitly. Do I get the source files? Can my own team change wording? What does it cost if three screens change in a year? The answers tell you more about the total cost than the figure at the bottom of the quote.
So what does it cost
An honest indication, with the caveat that every situation differs.
A short, focused module based on existing and current source material, one language, standard design, knowledge assessment, sits in the low thousands. A module with its own imagery, scenario-based assessment and several languages sits at a multiple of that. VR scenarios on a specific installation start where the previous category ends.
More important than that range is the proportion. When the subject covers operations where a mistake costs six figures or injures somebody, the question is not whether the module is expensive but whether it works. A cheap module nobody takes seriously is the most expensive option there is, because you pay for it twice: a second programme follows behind it.
The cost question is bound up with how you set up your training offering as a whole. That trade-off is in the guide on setting up or renewing a corporate academy. What we build and in which form is on the solutions page.