Small website build, quoted a flat 1200 because a similar one took me about 25 hours last year. This one took 60 because of content delays, an extra language nobody mentioned, and a plugin that broke everything. That is about 20 an hour. I do not want to just add a percentage and hope. How do people build a quote that survives contact with reality?
The bigger issue is that the delays were not your fault and you paid for them anyway. Put in a clause saying that if client materials arrive more than N days late the timeline moves and further work is billed hourly. It is not aggressive, it is how every trade on earth works.
The wording that works for me is a project pause clause: after 14 days waiting on client input the project pauses, and re-entering the schedule may carry a fee.
At some point stop pricing from hours entirely. What was the site worth to them? A local business getting an ordering system that saves someone ten hours a week is not buying 25 hours of your time. Value pricing is not a trick, it just requires you to ask questions in the sales call that most freelancers skip.
Frame them as scoping rather than pricing: what happens today, who does it, how long does it take them. You need the answers anyway and the price falls out of them.
I find those questions genuinely awkward to ask.
Separate the plugin disaster from the pricing lesson. That one was bad luck and a contingency line covers it. The content delay and the extra language are scope, and scope is a contract problem rather than an estimating problem.
@adjunct_life · 8mo ago · 3 replies
Three changes fixed this for me. First, quote a range with the assumptions listed underneath — content supplied by date X, one language, no ecommerce — and say plainly what happens when an assumption fails. Second, estimate in tasks and include the boring ones everyone forgets: kickoff call, revisions, testing, handover, and the four hours of admin. Third, track your actual hours on every job even when it is fixed price, because you cannot price what you have never measured. After six jobs you will have a personal multiplier. Mine turned out to be 1.7 times my gut estimate, consistently.
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@adjunct_life · 8mo ago
Everyone's is between 1.5 and 2 and everyone believes theirs is 1.1.
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@curious_wren · 8mo ago
1.7 is depressingly close to my 25 to 60.
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