![]() ![]() First off: You probably shouldn’t be working 40 hours a week. Your client will know this too, and insist on either a discount for the week or roll over two days to next week. Wait until Thanksgiving and Black Friday come around and society dictates you work a 3-day workweek.Did I mention that the focus is continuously on the product, and not the blows of the hammer required to make that product? This attitude shift can seriously affect what you’re able to charge your clients.You’re still billing for your time, but at a larger increment. You’re still able to shield yourself from sudden changes in scope.The focus is on the deliverables, not what it took to get there.Note: All of the highest rate consultants I know - those with an effective rate of $500-$1000 an hour - bill by the week. You’re able to obfuscate the details and get your clients to focus only on one thing: the value you’re delivering to their business. If you want to price off of value, and the project’s scope is loosely defined or in flux, weekly billing is your best friend. You don’t need to worry about the overhead of context switching.” Easily fixed: “I dedicate my attention on any given day to just one client. Your client may need to be conditioned.Do you roll over that time to… tomorrow morning? It becomes awkward to, say, take the morning off for an appointment.You can reply to emails and jump on quick Skype calls on “off days” without your client fearing that this will appear front and center on their next invoice.You obfuscate exactly what happened during the day.I first came across daily billing when I noticed that a lot of UK freelancers billed this way. To a client, this gives them direct exposure into how their product (more on this later) is being built, which can inadvertently encourage some to micromanage and breach the client vendor relationship. An hour of development, followed by an hour of meetings, and then maybe another hour sketching out concepts. (Though tools like Planscope are meant to make this much easier.)ĭaily billing is a step up from hourly, in that you can start obscuring “how the sausage factory works.” Meaning: When you’re billing hourly, an itemized invoice usually lists out what got done. You need to be vigilant in how you track time, lest you undercharge.For sizable projects, it becomes very tricky to accurately gauge a realistic hourly estimate.Clients tend to like to comb through invoices, and aren’t usually happy to see “non valuable” entries like meetings or bug fixes / design tweaks.If you’re 2x faster than a more junior person, you’re billing half the time they are. You can take days off or work half days without getting into murky discussions like you might with, e.g., weekly billing contracts.You get to charge whenever you’re on the phone, in a meeting, or tapping on your keyboard or mouse.Clients who have hired freelancers in the past expect to pay by the hour. Every few weeks you sum up your time logs, multiply them by your rate, and send them over to your client. When you’re plugged in to your keyboard (or telephone) and doing stuff for your client, the meters running. You’re pretty much a faucet you can be turned on, and you can be turned off. And because you’re billing by the hour, if the client decides to change course midway through the project, you’re protected. At first, it seems like the most obvious way to do things… divide your former salary by 2000, inflate the result to compensate for the administrative, sales, and time-off overhead, and you’re good to go. The majority of American freelance developers and designers bill by the hour. In this post, I’ll overview the pros and cons of each, and end with my recommendations. There seem to be a limitless number of ways to charge your clients. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, per feature, per project. Today I’d like to, once and for all, answer a question that I’ve been asked hundreds of times.
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