The Pricing Puzzle: How to Charge Clients as a Freelancer
If you're a freelancer, you likely have been or still are confused about how exactly to charge for your work.
There aren't many freelance niches that include pricing standards.
It's the wild west out here!
Should you charge per hour? Per day? Per cup of coffee?
In this article, we're going to discuss the right way to approach selling your services and why one method is the clear winner while the other adds unnecessary friction to your clients' decisions.
How Should You Charge for Your Work?
We're about to lose some people already we can feel it but, except for rare exceptions, we don't believe in charging people an hourly or daily fee.
Here's why:
When customers ask you for a quote, they're not looking to see how much it costs to rent your time.
They want to know how much it will cost for you to take their vision and translate it into a beautiful end product.
Your customers are not paying for your process, they are paying for the results.
So How Should You Quote for a Project?
We personally prefer to leave out hourly considerations entirely and do a project price based on the expected amount of deliverables.
Why?
Because quoting based on an hourly price makes it about you.
Quoting based on an overall project price makes it about your customer and the results they are looking for.
How you calculate your price behind the scenes might very well be based on how many hours you expect to work on that project.
That's fine.
The client doesn't need to know that and probably doesn't care.
At most, they may prefer to see the deliverables broken down by price depending on how many different types of work the project involves.
But even then, there's no need to go into how long each of these tasks takes to complete.
Always keep the focus on the client's results.
P.S. Your pricing quotes should always have some safety buffer built into them. When your client needs something extra (as they almost always do) that wiggle room means you'll be able to give it to them and make it seem like you're doing them an extra favor when in reality you covered your bases with that original buffer.
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Takeaway
As with many other aspects of running a business, your main focus should always be on your customer.
If you put yourself first (e.g. charging hourly because that's most "fair" to you even though it adds friction to your client's decision), you put your entire business at risk because your customer will react unfavorably to any situation they feel leaves them at a disadvantage.
"It takes months to find a customer... but just seconds to lose one."
Vince Lombardi
Put systems in place that assure you are paid fairly for your work while still leaving your customer in charge and you will surely see better results when negotiating your next freelance gig!
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