Adding Custom Balloons

I’m asked fairly regularly if custom balloons can be added to the race. In the past I’ve added Kites, Pride and NHS Balloons.

I’ve paid for these alterations to help the race grow but this is no longer viable going forward.

My developers charge £250 per hour to work on the site and usually it’s a minimum of 2 hours. When they add new designs they make the graphic image in various sizes and alter the database and lists etc.

For example, these 6 Snails cost me £750+vat to add.

So if you’re thinking of adding a dog, cat or logo I’d estimate the cost to be between £250 for 1 balloon & maybe £500 for 3 of the same design but in different colours.

Once your custom balloons have been added you can limit the designs on offer.

See also this 2021 post on custom balloons.

If you add a boat it will most likely be that some will want a Red boat and some will want a Blue boat and so 1 boat will not be enough. Ultimately this will put pressure on your sales as you’ll need to make more profit to cover the cost of implementing all these designs.

The next problem is the scale. If you just have 100% boats in your race the scale doesn’t matter – but if balloons & boats are mixed together the scale doesn’t work as a boat should be 1000 times bigger than a balloon. I got around this with my Halloween theme by adding the images onto the balloons. So an image of a Witch on a balloon works and it keeps to the whole thing a “Balloon Race”.

Designs need to be simple because on the widget and leaderboards the images are tiny.