Requesting speed

Ask for a rush as a question, not an instruction: "Is a faster turnaround possible, and would that change the quote?" That line acknowledges that speed reorders someone's paid work and usually costs more, which makes the answer an easy yes or an easy no rather than an awkward exchange.

The line that works

"Is a faster turnaround possible, and would that change the quote?" does the whole job in one sentence. It asks rather than assumes, and it names the fact that speed usually costs something, which a judge does not then have to explain to you before answering.

The line that does not

"I need this by tomorrow" sent with no acknowledgement that this reorders someone's paid work is the version that gets a slow reply or none. It reads as an instruction rather than a request, and a judge who has a queue of other buyers waiting their turn has no reason to treat yours as the exception for free.

The difference is not the ask itself, since both messages want the same thing. It is whether the message accounts for what granting it actually costs the person on the other end.

Why the premium is not a shakedown

A rush request asks a judge to move your clip ahead of clips they had already planned to do first, which means either working later than planned or bumping someone else's stated window. Why judges price a faster turnaround covers the mechanics of that premium in more detail; the short version is that it reflects real displaced work, not an arbitrary surcharge.

What to do if the answer is no

Some judges do not offer rush delivery at all, regardless of price, because their queue does not have room to be reordered. That is a complete answer. Do not follow up asking why, or offering more money for the same no - a decline on turnaround is exactly as final as a decline on anything else.

Many rush requests start with an optimistic plan: Newby-Clark, Ross, Buehler and colleagues (2000) found that people's task completion plans "normally resemble best-case scenarios" and yield overly optimistic predictions of completion times.

If turnaround matters more than which judge you use, checking what turnaround normally looks like before you commission at all avoids the rush question coming up under pressure later.

If speed is the only thing you actually want

An automated score returns in minutes by default and has no queue to jump, which is the honest reason it exists for buyers who care about speed more than a person's attention. The same is true of a self-service leaderboard entry, where an instant number needs no one's schedule accommodated at all, and a measurement you take yourself with a stated method is faster still, since nobody else's time is involved.

If you are still deciding whether the wait for a person is worth it, Rate Cock's comparison of the two options lays out the tradeoff plainly.