Price Freelance Projects Properly with MyPrice
Whether you’re a seasoned freelancer or just starting out, choosing the right price point for your client’s projects can be tricky and stressful. Today I’m going to walk you through the iOS app MyPrice, which is designed to factor in all of the variables to determine the most appropriate valuation for your time and effort.
Step 1: Set Up Your Profile
Putting the right price on your time and your work is one of the most crucial decisions you can make as a freelancer, and for good reason. The ideal rate will convey to your client your personal value for what you do. It will assert your expertise in your field, and your intention to make a living from your craft. However, there are a lot of factors that need to be taken into account when determining that magic number. And doing so can be an arduous process.
MyPrice considers all of those factors by asking you to respond to a series of questions before suggesting an optimal price point for your work. When you first launch the app, you’ll have to fill out your Profile. This is personal information that won’t necessarily change from project to project, and will establish an ideal rate for any hourly work you might perform, outside of a contracted project.
In addition to answering questions about your area of expertise and level of experience, MyPrice will also use some of the following information when calculating your ideal price point:
- Routine work expenses (office rent, supplies)
- Routine personal expenses (mortgage, insurance)
- Full-time vs. part-time freelancing
- Plans for the future
- Location
In order to provide a hands-on view of MyPrice in action, I’ve populated my Profile with my details. I’m a college-educated web designer working from my Ohio home with relatively low routine expenses. With all of my information on file, MyPrice suggests that I charge an hourly rate of 20.42 USD.
Note: MyPrice is currently only able to work with accurate location data for Canada, United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Spain, and Australia. Any other countries will calculate estimates with rough figures that can serve as a strong starting point.
That’s perfectly fine if my client wants me to spend an afternoon performing some site maintenance. But what if a client wants me to start a new, big project from scratch? That situation can bring on a whole slew of new expenses and complications to your work day.
Let’s suppose that XYZ Inc. wants me to redesign their website, fortunately, MyPrice can help me figure out what to charge.
Step 2: Create a Project
From the Calculate tab (which should presently indicate your ideal hourly rate based on your personal profile that you filled out in the last section), you can tap one of two buttons. The first will allow you to revise your profile in order to recalculate your hourly rate, but since we’re working on a project, let’s tap New Project.
MyPrice offers a rather impressive list of potential projects for which you can calculate rates. For this website redesign, we’ll select HTML+CSS Site from the Web Design category. Now it’s time to answer more questions. I know there are a lot of them, but I promise, it’s worth it.
Each new project will begin with the Basis category. Once completed, this category will become un-editable, since it is essentially a list of basic attributes of the project. For example, in the Basis section of your project, you will indicate what type of client the project is for, your applicable skill level for the type of project, the complexity of the project, and the ultimate goal.
Once the Basis is established, you will proceed by outlining the more detailed aspects of your project. The questionnaire is much too lengthy for me to go into too much detail, but suffice to say that it thoroughly maps the ins and outs of your project (specific to the project type, as well). When all of the parameters have been set, the end result is an itemized estimate for each leg of your project.
Step 3: Act
Once your estimate is complete, you have a couple of options. First, you could simply use it as an estimate, and draw up a revised document separately to send to your client. Second, you could use the built-in functionality to send your estimate to Freshbooks. But I’m a simple guy, so I’ll use the button on the Estimate page to email the estimate directly to my client.
Once the estimate is shipped off, I can revisit or even revise the project itself by visiting the History tab. A condensed list shows all of the projects I’ve worked with in MyPrice, giving me easy access to my estimates whenever I need them.
Extras
The estimate has already been sent to the client, but there are few more features of MyPrice that can benefit you as a freelancer. The last two tabs are Tips and Jobs.
Tips are updated regularly and can provide some useful advice on freelancing and financing. The Jobs tab aggregates job openings from around the world. If you find one that looks appealing, you can send an email to the company directly from MyPrice.
Lastly, MyPrice has an iPad version (also free) that supports CloudSync, so you have access to your projects and estimates no matter what device you’re using.
Conclusion
There seems to be almost as many tools to help with your freelancing as there are methodologies and philosophies for freelancing. MyPrice is a neat iOS application that doesn’t try to do too much, but definitely can give you some relief when it comes to the often stressful and delicate matter of pricing your time and work.
By streamlining the price estimation process, you can spend less time on financing and bookkeeping and more time doing the work you love. (And isn’t that the freelance dream?) MyPrice is a free application for iPhone and iPad, so try it out and let us know how it helps your business!
This is a sponsored review or giveaway of a product/service that's particularly relevant to our readers.
Leave a Comment
Finally! Freelancers can say, “There’s an app for that.” and as far as I’m concerned not a moment too soon.
Oh WOW. This will be SO HELPFUL. I never really know what to charge my clients.
Yes, there’s an app for that now. Thanks for sharing this little piece of app with us!
thank you so much for your support, do you any software for tracking my bills, and tracking my hours work for my freelance graphic design, i would appreciate if you can suggest me any resource
@Ana maria I use Hours Tracker, which you might find helpful : http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/hourstracker-time-sheet-time/id321923934?mt=8
Great article, definitely will give this app a try!
now they just need to put that out there for android!!!
Nice! What if you want a way to access something like this on your desktop? Any recommendations?
Thanks for the App, I think it can be very useful. I will try to price my next project with it.
Definitely need it for the Android.
Are there any similar programs available for Android?
It seems to place extreme emphasis on how long you’ve been freelancing. I played with varying the education, industry reputation, length of full-time career, size of portfolio, and nothing had all that much effect, usually under $5 from one extreme to the other. Telling it I’ve been freelancing for only 0-1 years, though, as opposed to 6+ years, knocked $30 off the rate!
Also it’s very limited WRT the length of time one’s been working. What about those of us with multi-decade careers? Surely that counts for well more than six.
Lastly, an outright bug: it seems to keep forgetting the 6+ year length I had a fulltime job. It was very annoying to have to keep resetting that every time I changed anything else in that section.
Overall, I’d say it can help absolute newbies get a clue… but if you’re experienced, you’ve probably seen enough of what your colleagues are charging, or what clients have accepted or declined, to get a much better sense of what to charge than what this app supplies.
It’s a good app to get a good idea of what your rates should be. However, I think the hourly rate calculator on FreelanceSwitch is much better, in that you see and consider what sort of expenses are there, while it shows how it calculates your rate. MyPrice doesn’t tell you how it calculates your rate (only in the FAQ’s section), so you’re left wondering about the legitimacy of your rate.
This app seems awesome and useful. But would you know if this is and will be available as a desktop anytime soon?
$20.42 freelance rate with a college degree? Say what?
After figuring taxes and operating costs, that’s like paying an $11/hr salary, or less than what some fast-food restaurants pay, or even less than what it costs to use an offshoring company nowadays.
I’m in rural Oklahoma, and that’s under half of what I charged starting out a few years ago – with no degree – and I’ve since tripled from that starting point. So according to the example, I’d have been considered extremely over-priced, while the market apparently considered me extremely under-priced.
Doesn’t look very useful to me based on the example given.
I also found the pricing quite low. One of the factors could be that South Africa isn’t one of the currencies it supports. But I defaulted to a similar city in terms of business, relative population as well as design competition.
I’ve been a designer for more than 13 years and struggled with pricing myself once I moved to freelancing. So I think it’s a good way to teach a newbie about the factors that need to be considered when working out your hourly rate.
But overall, I felt slightly under valued.
Good, clean, easy to use app though.
Great looking app, but unfortuneatly it is an APP! Free yes, but limited to Apple IOS.
It would have taken much less development time to make it HTML5, with a real website and then have mobile users use the website. Through stats they could have determined where most of the users were coming from and built an app for that platform.
Maybe there are 100% more users that have blackberries that want to use this service, but then again maybe they got it right, but there is a 51/49 split on IOS vs Android users, so they are throwing out the 49%.
Oh well, my business is all freelance and the contracts are based on past relationships and mostly an hourly rate at what the market can bear.
FreelanceSwitch….I LOVE YOU! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR PUTTING ME ON TO THIS WONDERFUL APP!