Providing a price estimate for a rendering job is always a difficult undertaking. Unfortunately, there is no real way to predict how much a job will take to render, unless you have intimate knowledge about that job. And even when you have that knowledge, it’s still a lot of guesswork involved.
Since it’s so difficult to predict the time it will take a project to render, the guys at RenderStreet, the company that acquired BlenderRenders, have been kind enough to offer a signup bonus to our users, so they can test their renders and try to estimate how long they will take.
With this approach, the estimate is relatively simple: just render a few frames from your animation, with average render times, and extrapolate from there. For example, if a frame takes 50 seconds to render and you have 500 of them in your project, it’ll take about 7 server-hours to render the entire project. From there, based on the membership level you have at RenderStreet, you can figure out how much it will cost.
As for the rendering time, that depends on how many servers you get allocated, which is a function of your membership level as well. They are usually completed very fast, even for users at the Bronze level.