Frequently asked questions

Choreus began as a way for us (Jacky Winter) to have a proper avenue to work with off-roster artists as well as give unrepresented artists the ability to work with an agent/producer on demand, on their own terms. We launched the service in 2019 as Corvid, and changed the name two years later for obvious reasons.

In October 2016, we relaunched Choreus as a native app experience, built on top of Cobbler, the very app that we built for Jacky Winter that is the backbone of our entire agency.

Utilising the same systems and workflows that we have perfected over 20 years, Choreus has been built specifically to be an end-to-end practice management tool for illustrators and other commercial artists.

All the base features you need to quote and invoice are completely free within the app, however there are also enhanced features available in our Choreus Plus plan, including off-the-shelf license packs based on actual industry data. There’s also a suite of ‘Call My Agent’ tools that link you directly to a live producer or agent in either the USA, UK, or Australia. If you want to go further, you can also access a producer to manage the entirety of your job from start to finish, with a sliding scale commission.

In addition to the app, we also maintain the Choreus artist directory, a curated list of 300+ independent artists. For those times when a brief needs someone outside the Jacky Winter roster, this is where we start, and also share with clients.

For more details read the other FAQ entries below, or better yet, sign up for an account now! Go on, tap the button!

It's actually free. The plan is called Core, and it's the whole app for running a freelance practice: unlimited jobs, quotes and invoices on your own paperwork, the dashboard, the calendar, your clients and contacts, as many currencies as you need, your logo and colours on everything. There's no card to enter and no countdown, and nothing switches off after thirty days.

The reason we can do this is that the software already exists. Cobbler has been running Jacky Winter for the better part of twenty years, and opening up the artist's half of it costs us very little. Some people will want the extra tools in Choreus Pro, some will want one of our producers on a job, and that's how it pays for itself. If you only ever use the free plan, that's fine by us!

No, and no. Using Choreus doesn't make you a Jacky Winter artist, doesn't tie you to us, and doesn't put a commission on anything you quote or invoice through it. A listing in the Choreus directory isn't representation either, it's a page that potential clients can find you on. The only time we take a fee on a job is when you've asked a producer to work on it through our Get a Producers ervice, and that's a fee for that job, agreed up front, which ends when the job does. If you already have an agent, you can use the tools exactly as they are. In fact, Choreus is a great way to bring together jobs that you do with your agent and jobs you do on your own.

Choreus has been made for anyone who runs their own commercial art practice. Illustration is where Jacky Winter started, but the app is just as at home with animation, photography, design, lettering, 3D, motion and art direction, because the business side of all of them looks much the same.

Currently, things like off-the-shelf line item packs and license packs (Choreus Pro) are more tailored to Illustration and animation, as are our live ‘Call my Agent’ features, but we are looking to expand those in the coming months,

Where you live doesn't matter either. We have offices in Melbourne, London and New York, and the artists we work with are all over the place. You can quote and invoice in ten currencies, each with its own tax and bank details, so an Australian invoice shows GST and a British one shows VAT without you having to think about it, and a job in US dollars doesn't upset the rest of your books. Choreus Pro is one price in US dollars wherever you are.

Further localisations for other EU countries are in our development pipeline.

Nope! Plenty of people have existing systems for quoting and invoicing already sorted. You can still log your jobs, use many other tracking features, and simple hide Quotes and Invoices from the sidebar. Choreus is happy to be the layer on top of whatever you already use.

We’d still give Choreus a go before you decide, because it's built for how creative work is actually made and sold, which most other invoicing apps have never had to think about. Sign up now and join the waitlist for a short 10-15 minute onboarding and we can show you how it can fit in with your current stack.

Choreus Pro adds a series of power-user features on top of the free core plan such as:

A licensing tracker, which keeps every licence you've sold in one place and the tools to follow them up… a cashflow forecast built from the jobs you've won and the invoices that are out, offset against your expenses… post-production checklists for the things that make the next job easier… a CRM built on Jacky Winter’s own methodology for client outreach.

On the paperwork side there are read receipts on estimates and invoices… support for multiple sets of terms… off-the-shelf licensing packs with usage pricing drawn from twenty years of our own jobs… an advanced Cobbler document style with support for cover images, support to BYO own domain, and honestly so much more!

You can try all of it free for a week, no card, from the Plans page. After that, it costs 39.00 USD per month.

Yes! It’s an actual human person, every time. There's no chatbot or AI generated info anywhere in the Call My Agent features. On the other end are the Jacky Winter agents and producers who quote, negotiate and hustle for our own artists every day, and have done so over something like twelve thousand commissions over time.

When you submit a request, it will be triaged by our team in the closest office to you - either the UK, USA, or Australia and responded to within 24 hours, usually sooner.

Most features here run on credits, which are USD 50 each, cheaper in packs of five or ten, and they never expire. Choreus Pro members get automatic discounts as well.

The hotline offers services that range from a quick back and forth over text to longer and more intensive video or phone calls

If you want more than advice, the Get a Producer service puts one of us on the job itself like having an actual agent or producer on demand and it works more like a traditional commission arrangement, except it’s on your terms, when you need it. Rates range depending on services required. We can just do the finicky admin like paperwork, or we can handle everything from first quote to final payment. Drop us a line and we can tell you more!

As an agency, we know exactly how that question sounds, and we'd rather answer it plainly: what you put into Choreus is yours, and we don't look at it, use it, sell it or share it. Our agents and producers can't browse your account, your client list isn't visible to us, and using your data to approach your clients, scout you, or train anything is against our privacy policy (and morals…). The one way someone here sees inside your account is if you switch on support access in Settings to get a bug fixed, which lasts 24 hours and is logged. When you ask the Hotline something, the agent answering sees what you put in the question and nothing else. Card payments go through your own Stripe acc, so your card number never touches us.

We’ve spent a lot of time to write our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use in plain english that addresses this in more detail as well.

Over the years we've asked a lot of artists which parts of being represented they'd keep and which they'd hand back if they could pick and choose. The answers split pretty cleanly. Some want an agent opening doors and are happy running their own jobs. Others have no trouble getting work or getting their name out there, but the management side makes them want to lie down. The app is more for the second group, and the directory is our small way of doing something for the first.

It's a list of unrepresented artists we love and want to keep an eye on, published on choreus.co. We draw on it when a brief comes through that we can't solve from our own roster, which happens more often than you'd think, especially when a client needs someone in a particular location or with a certain cultural identity. It isn't an agency and it doesn't make you a Jacky Winter artist: clients find your page and contact you directly, there's no commission and no obligation, and you can switch the listing off whenever you like. It's another way to get your work out there and stay on our radar, and if you ever want a producer on a job, it helps that we already know who you are.

Applying is free: your name, your email and a link to your work, on choreus.co. We have a look, and once you're approved you build your page in the app, under Directory.

Nothing you use in Choreus is AI, and for now we're keeping any use of it to a minimum. No model writes your quotes or answers your Hotline question; when you ask us something, it's a JW agent who answers.

Where we have used it is in building the app. Some of Choreus's back-end functionality has been written with the help of AI coding tools, the way a lot of software is made now, with our human developers checking the code and human designers deciding what gets built and how it should look and behave.

Your practice data isn't used to train anything, ours or anybody else's, and it's never sold or shared with anyone who would. The only images Choreus puts on the open web are the ones you choose to put on your directory page, and anything you attach to a job stays private to your account.

That said, we do have twenty years of our own numbers on what commercial art sells for, and we'd eventually like to find a way to do more with them to help you price work or make life easier. None of it will use what you've entered without your consent, and anything with AI in it, benchmarks included, will be opt-in when and if we pursue it.