Pricing Your Services

Pricing your services correctly is so important to any freelancer – it can be the difference between staying in business and going bust. Learning to make money is a core freelance skill, from setting our prices, choosing our hourly and fixed rates, and learning to adjust these rates as our skills increase over time. Below are a few handy resources to help you charge what you’re worth — today, tomorrow, and into the future.

The FreelanceSwitch Rates Calculator

We have developed this hourly rate calculator to give you a guide based on your costs, number of billable hours and desired profit. This very handy tool will help you figure out how much you should be charging per hour.

Nine Factors to Consider When Determining Your Price

Part guesswork, part experience, part number crunching – however you look at it, determining your price is a difficult task. Figuring out how much you should charge isn’t just about the numbers. In this article you will learn various issues you must consider when determining your price.

Hourly vs. Fixed Pricing

There’s a lot of dispute about what’s the right way to charge, and doing it wrong can lead to unwanted situations between you and your clients. Should you charge by the hour or by the job? In this article Mathias Meyer goes into the most common ways to charge and how to make them work successfully for you.

The Price Is Right

A practical guide to making both you and your client happy with your rates. In this article, Scott Wills covers the basics of setting prices and how to avoid pricing yourself out of business. He shows how to create your own personalized baseline and profit margins. And advices, to never offer a price for a gig that is lower than how much you need to both break-even and make a profit.

Figuring Out How Much To Charge

Here you can get a short insight into how Collis quotes a web design job. He breaks down each task required to complete the job, to estimate the time involved, then adds in any additional costs, like hosting. Finally, he covers varying his rate based on estimated additional complications, like meetings, difficult clients, or on the other side reduced rates for awesome jobs and non-profits. You have quite a bit of leeway when quoting for freelance gigs.

3 Ways to Raise Your Rates and Crush Your Freelancing Fears

It’s normal to have worries as a freelancer. Concern about getting the next paying client is crucial to our success as freelancers. However, while having fear is fine, letting it hold you and your business back is not. To help you overcome freelancing fear and self-doubt — and grow your business — here are three strategies for overcoming fear and raising your rates.

How To Tell When Your Rates Are Too Low

There are times when our rates, as freelancers, are too low. It could be that you’re just getting started and you’re not confident in your skills yet. Or you’ve been freelancing for quite some time and haven’t raised your rates as you’ve developed more marketable skills. In these situations the best response is to raise our rates, and stop leaving money on the table.

Doubling Your Rate: A Thought Experiment

The tighter and stronger you define your niche, the more valuable you become to the folks who are in that niche. You can charge more by positioning yourself as a knowledgeable freelancer, for a specific customer type, with proven results in case studies from past clients, or you can continue to meander in mediocrity as a generalist. This article explores how to double your rates by narrowing your freelance customer focus.

Fast, Good, Cheap: Pricing Freelance Work

Have you ever heard of the Fast, Good, Cheap pricing method? Clients should only be able to choose 2 of these 3 words to define a project’s needs. It’s important you keep this in mind when pricing your next job; otherwise, your work, income, and freelance career could be suffering.

When One Rate Does Not Fit All: Negotiating With Clients that Want All-in-One Fees

Having a set fee for services is a professional freelance practice. You need to set a price range for a brochure design, written sales page, or website that reflects the scope of the project. You’ll need to consider the variables though, depending on if the client will require meetings, extra research, or other factors that could add to your time spent on the project. When pitching package prices to client’s it’s important to review some of these variables with your potential client and how they can reflect your final quote.

The Subtle Effects of Pricing on the Mentality of Clients

Pricing obviously has a huge impact on how much money we make, but what about its affect on potential clients? Pricing subconsciously, and even overtly, affects a client’s preconceived expectations, their impression on your skills, and yes, even how they view your professionalism. Because of the significant impacts that prices have on potential clients, freelancers should seriously consider what their prices are communicating.

Trading the Hourly Rate for Task-based Pay: Should You Do It?

Skellie takes the plate and bats out the method of per task pay. Learn the benefits of moving away from hourly pay and starting to charge based on quoted project rates. There are quite a few benefits to this method, such as: how it rewards your productivity, allows you to charge more for results driven work, and how it gives tremendous flexibility in setting our prices.