Animation quoting collapses when reduced to 'cost per minute'. A 60-second motion-graphics explainer with stock assets is 3,500-6,000 GBP. A 60-second frame-by-frame hand-drawn piece with character animation is 18,000-42,000 GBP. A 60-second mixed-media short with rotoscoped live action and 2D overlays is somewhere unpredictable in between. A generic chatbot quoting a per-minute average misleads both the producer with a small budget (who books elsewhere on a wrong-tier promise) and the producer with a real budget (who under-scopes and then feels squeezed at proposal).

SleekAI reads your showreel, technique tier pages, and rate card from WordPress. It quotes properly: 2D motion graphics with stock assets at one tier, custom-illustrated 2D at another, frame-by-frame hand-drawn at a third, mixed-media or 3D at a fourth. It captures intended use (explainer, brand film, music video, title sequence, broadcast), length, style references, deadline, and source assets (script, voiceover, music, brand guidelines) before booking a creative call.

Producers asking 'roughly what would a 60-second 2D explainer cost' get an actual range with the assumptions called out. Producers describing a frame-by-frame ambition with a 6,000 GBP budget get a respectful redirect to motion-graphics-with-character-illustration as a realistic alternative, instead of a misleading 'yes we can do that' that wastes a creative call. Multibot lets a commercial bot run on /commercial and a brand-film bot run on /brand. Display conditions hide the bot from the /careers area where applicants don't need a quoting flow.

Animation is one of the few creative disciplines where the price-per-minute can vary by an order of magnitude inside the same brief. A 60-second 2D motion-graphics explainer and a 60-second frame-by-frame hand-drawn piece are both 'a 60-second 2D animation' on paper, but they sit at 6,000 GBP and 42,000 GBP respectively. A generic chatbot quoting 'around 10,000 GBP for 60 seconds' misleads producers in both directions: the motion-graphics budget gets anchored too high, the frame-by-frame budget gets anchored impossibly low.

Technique-aware chat fixes the anchoring problem before it starts. Producers describing flat-vector ambitions hear a real motion-graphics number. Producers describing painterly hand-drawn ambitions either hear the real frame-by-frame number or get respectfully redirected to a more realistic tier given their stated budget.

The creative call that follows is a conversation about direction, not a renegotiation of tier. Revision round policy and rush surcharge logic also belong in the first conversation, not at proposal stage. Producers who think 'a couple of revisions' means six rounds will be disappointed; producers who think two weeks is achievable for frame-by-frame will be misled.

SleekAI quotes these boundaries from your published policy and rate card directly, so the creative director's first 30 minutes with the producer is about style and story, not about explaining why the schedule the producer's planning isn't possible. The principal's hour goes to the brief that's worth shaping a treatment for, not the brief that should have been a 'sorry, not the right fit' email.