Pick a pricing model for each type of work you do.
Take one job you finished recently and divide what you were paid by the hours it took. How you charge shapes what you earn as much as what you charge, and that figure shows whether your current method is helping or holding you back.
Say two freelance designers produce the same logo. One needs three days. The other needs one day, because she has done fifty logos and this one is her fiftieth. Billed by the hour, the slower designer collects three times as much for an identical result. The faster designer has done nothing wrong; the fault sits with the method of charging.
With hourly pricing you charge for the time you spend. It is easy to explain and quick to quote, and it is fair when nobody can predict the work, for instance repairing an unfamiliar system or giving open-ended support.
It has two problems. Your earnings stop at your billable hours, and lesson 7.1 showed how few of those a freelancer has. To earn more you must lift the rate, and clients push back on a higher rate when they see it per hour. The second problem is that speed and skill count against you: the better you get, the less a job pays, as with the designer who finished her fiftieth logo in a day. Clients on hourly billing also tend to watch the clock, so each hour gets questioned. Hourly pricing is a sensible start while you learn how long jobs take, and a poor long-term arrangement.
Project pricing means quoting one fixed price for an outcome: a logo, a website, a batch of social media posts, a report. The client knows the total before work begins, and if you work quickly, the gain is yours.
You now carry the risk. A job that runs past your estimate costs you the extra time. Jobs also expand, which is called scope creep: one more revision, then a slightly different version for another page, then a quick colour change. Each looks minor, but together they can double the work for the same fee.
Guard against this with a written scope agreed before you start. It states what is included, how many revision rounds the client gets, what the client must supply and the date it is due, and what counts as extra. Anything outside it gets its own quote. With no written scope, a fixed price becomes an open-ended commitment for a fixed fee.
Value pricing sets the fee from what the result is worth to the client instead of from your hours or a standard rate. A brand refresh for a cafe hoping for a few extra customers a week is worth one amount. Similar work, in similar hours, for a company launching a product it expects to sell thousands of is worth much more.
You can only price like this once you know what the client wants to achieve and what failure would cost them. Finding that out is discovery. Ask questions such as "What happens if this is not done by the launch?" and "How will you know this worked?" "Discovery: questions that find the real problem" teaches the skill in depth.
Value pricing suits work with a clear link to the client's results, where the client can see the link too. Small, routine jobs suit it badly, since the client sees a standard deliverable and expects a standard price.
A retainer is a fixed monthly payment for an agreed amount of work or availability, such as up to a set number of hours or a fixed list of tasks. Its effective rate is usually below what project work pays. What you get back is predictable income, which the other models do not give you. Under the base-pay method that counts for a lot, because a retainer pays part of your base pay before any other work comes in.
Mei, a freelance designer in a made-up example, is offered S$2,000 a month for up to 25 hours of design work. She runs five checks. She divides the monthly fee by the maximum hours: using all 25, she earns S$80 an hour. She compares that with her floor rate from lesson 7.1, which is S$57, so S$80 passes. She sets it against her project work, which averages about S$95 an hour; 25 project hours would bring S$2,375 (S$95 x 25), so the retainer costs her up to S$375 a month in rate. She works out the share of base pay it covers: S$2,000 is about 87% of her S$2,300 base pay, every month, whatever else happens. Finally she writes firm limits on hours or tasks into the agreement, so the retainer cannot slide into unlimited availability.
For many freelancers, accepting a lower rate in exchange for that steady income makes sense with one or two clients, provided the offer clears all five checks.
Most freelancers use two or three models rather than one for everything. Mei quotes project prices for logos and brochures, has one agency on a retainer for its monthly social media work, and bills hourly only for urgent fixes to files she did not create.
To decide which model a job gets, match it to one of these:
You can scope it clearly: quote a project price. The result is plainly worth a lot to the client, and you can find out how much: consider value pricing. It repeats every month: offer a retainer. It is truly unpredictable: charge by the hour.
Look at the jobs you do most often, and for each one ask which of those four descriptions fits it best.
Write down the three jobs you do most often. Next to each, put the pricing model you would use and one reason for it.
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