Comments on: When a Client Can’t Afford You: Why It’s Still Better to Bid High

By: Shreemani

Shreemani — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:48:10 +0000

Yeah sure… it no use working for less pennies, if you do then you’ll be the one suffering. It is better to work for free or work for the best of professional services. There is no use working for less.

By: brett

brett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 12:29:59 +0000

hi,
thank you for the article….i wish i had come accross it early….point #2 is something i could relate to by experience….people think if we charge less, it means we are either not Skilled enough or we are not having any work.

your article will help me further down the road to freelancing,
thanks,
brett.

By: Monique Smith

Monique Smith — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:34:15 +0000

What I do is give my client options. I give four choices with four different price figures and let them decide what they can price for. A la cartes work well for me.

By: Nic loves languages

Nic loves languages — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:53:24 +0000

Often in consulting the best marketing you can do is to set the price ridiculously high.

In the case that people know you already for something else, think politics or minor celebrity status, then charging ridiculous prices makes it look as though you are genuine. Paris Hilton charges (charged?) over the top prices to go to parties. That means that the party organisers who invited her always portrayed the image that they were serious about whatever it was they did, which was good for them.

Our ex-mayor here in Auckland, NZ now does consulting and charges through the roof but is always busy because the prices give the image that he does a good job.

Nic at CrossLingo

By: personal finance blog

personal finance blog — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 06:01:18 +0000

Looks very reasonable.

By: Josh

Josh — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 01:45:46 +0000

Luke:

The best advice I can give is to look at a few resources that discuss pricing your services.

I am a Freelance IT consultant and learned a lot from author Weiss entitled “Million Dollar Consulting”.

The major lesson I learned was that you start at a good price for your service. Then every year drop your lowest 10-20% of client base. Yes, you heard right, drop your clients (recommend them to other or new consultants is the best strategy.) You then raise your rates yearly across the board and offer payment plans that you can scale with your clients.

Check out the book, it’s worth it. I’m not making millions of dollars, but my business has matured and is getting higher paying and quality clients as a result!

By: Bellatrix

Bellatrix — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 18:45:40 +0000

This is definitely true. Sometimes you need to learn how to say no. Some projects are not the right ones and you end up spending too much time in something that either does not pay you well or you just do not enjoy doing. Another thing, sometimes you start up charging x amount per hour and then time passes by and this rate becomes a very low one, then how do you raise your rates? there should be an article about that too :)

By: Luke

Luke — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 06:32:40 +0000

This is a valuable article, and has informed me (or reinforced the reasons with regards to) being sure to quote a reasonable amount for work, even if it may be “high” in the eyes of the client.

The problem is, and I am sure I am not the only one here, trying to adjust the rates for a repeat client to a more reasonable level, after having made the mistake of undervaluing your time the first few contracts.

In my case, I freelance in a moonlighting capacity, and I have one client who represents most of my work. I have done a number of jobs for this client now, but I realise that my initial quote was under what I should have been charging (I should be looking at doubling my rates), and I also made the mistake of charging the client per hour, rather than per job, which means that I am constantly being asked to validate the amount of time each job I am given has taken – stressful for me, and I believe, distrustful on the client’s part.

How do I go about adjusting my rates to a more reasonable level, and/or transitioning from a per-hour arrangement to a more static per-job rate instead. Or, alternately, how to answer to the questions about the amount of time used retrospectively after the work is done.

One of the other aspects which leads to this situation, is the fact that I am normally being used in a remedial fashion – to fix problems with existing sites/frameworks or extending functionality rather than building from scratch.

An article pointing me (and workers like me) in a situation like this would be appreciated.

By: A Simple Way To Stop Clients From Rejecting Your Proposals | SulVision

A Simple Way To Stop Clients From Rejecting Your Proposals | SulVision — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 05:18:35 +0000

[...] A Simple Way To Stop Clients From Rejecting Your Proposals Tuesday, November 4, 2008, 1:38 This news item was posted in Freelance category and has 0 Comments so far. Just lost a potential client because they can’t afford you? [...]

By: Calvin Froedge

Calvin Froedge — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:11:11 +0000

This is something I’ve had to battle with myself, I hate losing clients, as I try to see every client as a source of money but I had to make myself realize that the cheap clients were ALWAYS more demanding, and it just wasn’t worth my time when I could be making more money with someone else.