Freelance pricing, written plainly
Designers going freelance ask me about rates more than about anything else, and most of the advice available is either a vague exhortation to charge more or a spreadsheet that assumes billable hours you will not have.
Here is what I actually do after six years of it, including the parts that took me an embarrassingly long time to work out, and the two pricing mistakes that cost me the most money.
Start with the arithmetic everyone gets wrong. A year has roughly 260 working days. You will not bill 260 of them. Take out holiday, illness, admin, invoicing, chasing invoices, proposals that go nowhere, and the gaps between engagements, and a healthy freelance year is 140 to 170 billable days. Plan for 150.
That means your day rate is not your salary divided by 260. It is your target income, plus your costs, plus tax, plus pension, plus the quarter you did not work, divided by 150. The number that produces is usually about twice what people expect, and it is the correct number.
Price the engagement, not the hour
I moved to project pricing in my second year and would not go back. Hourly billing punishes you for being fast, which is the exact skill you spent a decade acquiring, and it makes every conversation with a client an implicit negotiation about whether you are working hard enough.
A project price says: this scope, this outcome, this many weeks, this figure. If I find a better route through in half the time, that is my gain and the client got what they paid for, which was the outcome rather than the hours.
What a proposal needs
- The problem in their words, which proves you listened and is the part clients most often quote back
- What is in scope, specifically, listed as deliverables rather than activities
- What is explicitly out of scope, which is the sentence that saves the relationship later
- The timeline, with what you need from them and by when
- A single figure, with the payment schedule attached
- What happens if scope changes, stated before it does
That last one is the single highest-value paragraph in any proposal I write. Scope change is not a failure, it is normal. Deciding in advance how it will be handled turns an awkward conversation into an administrative one.
The two mistakes that cost me the most
The first was pricing discovery separately and cheaply, as a way to get in the door. It works, and it teaches the client that the thinking is the cheap part and the pixels are the expensive part. That is backwards, and it is very hard to unteach.
The second was not charging a deposit. I lost most of a month of work in year two to a company that reorganised and stopped answering. I now take 30% before I start on every engagement without exception, and no client I would want to work with has ever objected.
A client who will not pay a deposit is telling you something about how they will handle the final invoice.
On raising your rate
Raise it on new clients only, never mid-engagement, and do it the moment you turn down work because you are full. That is the market telling you plainly. Existing clients move to the new rate at their next engagement, mentioned once in a sentence, without apology or elaborate justification.
The last thing, which took me three years to believe: some clients will say no, and that is a functioning price rather than a failed negotiation. If nobody ever declines your rate, it is too low. I aim for roughly one in four saying no, and the three who say yes are consistently better to work with than the four who used to.
