Freelancing 101: How to price yourself

For freelancers, especially first-timers, one question always pops up: how do you determine how much to charge your client?

Long-time tech freelancer Jake Jorgovan says there are actually no rules. How you price your work is art, not science.

But unlike art, the way many people do it isn’t pleasing to the mind, body, and soul. They price their work low to attract as many clients as they can. And they end up doing backbreaking work that sucks all the energy out of them.

Jorgovan says there are ways to maximize one’s earning potential and maintain a healthy work-life balance without scaring clients away.

The key is to go for quality instead of quantity and not the other way around. He offers these unconventional tips to get you started:

Forget hourly rates

Charging by the hour isn’t a bad way for freelancers to earn. You estimate the number of hours a project will take. If it takes longer than you expected, you’re compensated for that additional time.

This is how Jorgovan did it in his early days as a freelancer. “I would utilize the time tracking software inside oDesk (now Elance-oDesk). This would literally track my computer activity as I worked on the project,” he recalls.

However, he says, “this method of billing is limiting.”

You only have 24 hours in a day and you can’t spend all of them on your work. You may increase your hourly rate, but the limit remains: you still have the same number of hours. In the end, you may be forced to extend what could be a short-term project since you earn by the hour.

Jorgovan says the better way to do it is to charge per project.

You can complete two or more projects with same quality, at the same rate, and in the same amount of time as you would if it’s on an hourly basis. You are limited only by how efficient you work and how productive you are.