How to Price Yourself
The 3 Easy Steps to Always Have a Price Ready
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If you’re a freelancer, you’ve heard it a million times.
“How much do you charge to make an app/write a blog/create this website?”
And when a freelancer doesn’t immediately have an answer ready, most people seem confused.
“But you’re a writer. How much to write my book?”
Pricing Breakdown
As a potential client, please bear in mind that any price I give you when we first chat has to be an estimate, as I don’t know exactly what you need yet.
In order to give you an accurate, customized quote I need to know exactly what you need and what your expectations of me would be.
Freelancers: To craft a price, you really only need 3 steps, 2 pieces of information, and simple math.
- How much money do you want to be making per hour?
- How many hours (approximately) will the work take you?
- What does the answer to number 1 times the answer to number 2 equal?
That will be your cost, assuming you don’t have any additional fees, such as hosting their website, purchasing software, buying a domain name, etc.
Hourly vs. Per-Word Pricing
I like the hourly pricing as it is an easy number that most clients understand, but many clients like doing per-word pricing.
No one has to track time and the final word count is obvious to everyone involved.
The breakdown for a per-word rate is similar to hourly.
- If you know how much you want to make per hour, for example, $75, then you can estimate how long the average 1000-word article takes you to research, write, and edit. Let’s say that’s two hours.
- Take the hourly rate that would be: $150 and divide it by the number of words. $150 divided by 1000 words is 0.15 or 15 cents per word.
It really is that simple.
So many aspiring writers ask me about prices, or I see people on Reddit, Medium, Quora, and other sites asking about an Upwork job that pays $0.02 per word for a…
