I’ve been freelancing on and off since 2003. The first invoice I ever sent was for $400, for a five-page brochure site, and I remember being weirdly proud of it. Looking back, that site took me about sixty hours, which works out to roughly $6.66 an hour. Even in 2003 money that was insulting. I just didn’t know any better.
So this is a list of pricing rules I’ve collected since then, mostly by getting them wrong first. Each one has a scar attached.
Charge per project, not per hour, for design work
Hourly billing is fine for sysadmin stuff or ongoing maintenance retainers. For design and build work, it punishes you for getting better. The faster you get, the less you make. The client also fixates on the hour count instead of the outcome, which leads to weird conversations like “why did the homepage take eleven hours?” Because I’ve been doing this for twenty years and I’m worth it, that’s why.
Project pricing is also less stressful. You quote a number, the client says yes or no, and then your job is to deliver the thing. No timesheet anxiety. I switched to project pricing fully around 2009 and my income roughly doubled in eighteen months without me working any more hours.
Raise rates 10% every year. Automatically.
This one I stole from an accountant friend over a beer. Just put a calendar reminder for January 1st and nudge the rate up. If you don’t do it on a schedule, you’ll never do it, because there’s never a good time. There’s always a slow quarter, a nervous client, a weird news cycle.
The thing nobody tells you: existing clients almost never push back. I’ve raised rates on long-term clients maybe a dozen times and I think I’ve had pushback exactly twice, and both times we landed at 7% instead of 10%. The catastrophic conversation you’re imagining in your head doesn’t happen.
Never give a price without seeing the brief in writing
This one I learned in 2007 from a guy who phoned me about “a quick site, just five pages, nothing fancy.” I quoted $3,000 over the phone like an idiot. The brief, when it finally arrived as a Word doc two weeks later, included a custom event booking system, a members-only forum, and “some kind of shop, we’ll figure out the details later.”
I did the project for $3,000 because I’d already verbally committed and I was 28 and didn’t know how to walk away. It took me four months. I didn’t make rent that summer.
Now the rule is simple: send me the brief, in writing, with a list of features and any reference sites. If they can’t be bothered to type it out, they’re not going to be a good client anyway. I usually push back with a Google Doc template that has the questions already in it. About half the time the client fills it in and we’re off. The other half, they ghost. Both outcomes are useful.
If you’re confident enough to negotiate down, you’re priced too low
This one I think I read in a Patio11 post around 2012 and it rearranged my brain. The logic: if a client says “can you do it for less” and your honest reaction is “sure, I have room,” then your original quote wasn’t a real number. It was a hopeful number with cushion baked in for the haggle.
A real quote is the price you can’t go below without resenting the work. When somebody asks for a discount on a real quote, the answer is “no, but I can take something out of scope.” That’s it. Same price, smaller deliverable. I started doing this in 2013 and I still lose maybe one client out of ten over it. The other nine respect it. Some of them respect it more than they would’ve respected a yes.
Add 30% to your gut-feel estimate
You will be wrong about how long the work takes. Not might be – will be. There will be a browser bug, a stakeholder who joins late, a CMS migration that has a quirk you didn’t see, a font license that needs sorting out, a stock photo provider that pulls an image the day before launch. Something. Always something.
So I take whatever number my gut says, multiply it by 1.3, and quote that. Sometimes I’m still under. Almost never am I over. (For really hairy projects with a lot of integrations, I go to 1.5x. The 30% rule is for normal work.)
Worth saying: this isn’t padding. This is honest pricing. “Padding” implies you’re sneaking extra into a number that should be smaller. You’re not. The 30% is the part you keep forgetting to count.
Charge for revisions past the second round
Two rounds of revisions are baked into every quote I write. After that, it’s $150 an hour, billed in fifteen-minute increments, and yes I’ll show you the timer. I put this in writing in the proposal, in plain language, and I bring it up again at kickoff.
The reason isn’t to nickel-and-dime. It’s to make scope creep visible. When a client knows the third round costs them, they suddenly have opinions about whether something really needs to change or whether they were just bored on a Tuesday. The rounds get tighter and the project ends. That’s the whole point.
The first time I tried this was in 2011 with a small e-commerce client who’d previously dragged me through nine rounds of homepage tweaks. With the new rule in the contract, we landed in two. Same client, same project type. Just a different incentive structure.
One more I’m still working on
The rule I haven’t mastered: charging deposits up front. I know I should. Fifty percent on signature, fifty on delivery, no exceptions. I do it about 80% of the time and the other 20% I get burned, every single time, and I don’t learn. If you’ve got a system that actually makes you do this, tell me.
If any of this is useful, the related stuff on running a small operation is over at A Helping Hand for Startupers. None of it is original – I just had to learn it slower than most.