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If you’re like most freelancers, you’ll be faced at some point with the challenge of sharing your pricing with a larger audience, and have to decide which route you’re going to take. Is it going to be a set amount (fixed cost) per project? An hourly rate? Or a mixture of both? We know that competitors look to each other’s websites for price comparisons, so it comes down to whether you’re confident in your pricing, and how your competitors match the level of expertise you’re offering.

Most freelancers will hide costs, or ask you to seek them out (by requesting a quote). They will then make the potential client wait too long for them to respond to the client’s request. This might seem like the best tactic to pricing, but making someone wait for pricing on your services (when you know roughly how much each type of project costs) will only result in a large spill in your sale funnel. If you haven’t already set up Google Analytics on your website, try it out so you can get a sense of where your website visitors are going, and how many drop off when they go to your services/pricing pages.

What I’ve learned:

At this point in my freelance business I’ve come to learn a few things:

• Pricing projects hourly results in higher than expected costs for the client, and time tracking (which no one likes) isn’t a useful way to measure the performance of freelancer.
• Setting a fixed price for a project can seem great at first glance – until you’ve done more work than you quoted for originally (due to unclear instructions on the project at hand).

Why I list my pricing online: 

After learning the hard way for both fixed pricing and hourly rates, I decided to list my pricing publicly, and indicate pricing ranges based on each type of project. This solves the issue of not setting an hourly rate for a project for which you don’t know the length of time it will take to complete, and gives you room to move your price up or down based on project requirements. Each project you work on is different, but based on the type of work, you usually have a set price and time range in mind.

Consider what you’re asking of your customers when all they are looking for is a simple price range on the work they need completed; you will find that less irrelevant inquires will be submitted, and more pre-qualified leads will be contacting you (knowing they are comfortable upfront with your price ranges).