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Perhaps one of the hardest skills to learn when freelancing in web design is how to fairly and effectively price your services. A project quote can either sell a client, or turn them away. Here are some guidelines on how to develop a web design pricing guide. A lot of people have different methods for coming up with their prices, but this is just to get you started. This guide only deals with charging per project. There are other ways of charging clients, but per project is the easiest and perhaps the most widespread method of pricing.

1. Determining Your Hourly Wage

This is by far the most important part of developing a pricing guide. You will always start with your hourly wage, so it’s critical to get it right from the start. It’s pretty simple to come up with your hourly wage. The formula looks a little something like this.

(Expenses + Salary) ÷ Hours Worked Per Year = Hourly Wage

Using this formula, if you wanted to make $60,000 a year, and spent $10,000 a year on say, hosting, stock photography / videos, fonts, etc., and you worked a normal 40 hour work week (2,000 hours a year), then your hourly wage would be (10,000 + 60,000) ÷ 2,000 = $35/hr. This is what you’ll be using in our pricing guide to determine how much you’ll charge per project.

2. Develop Base Prices For Different Project Types

Now that you have figured out your hourly wage, it’s time to incorporate that into some pricing. I’d recommend setting base values for all the different types of projects you’ll be dealing with. Say you’re a basic web designer, and you offer both design and coding. You would make a list of all the basic services you offer. Your list might look something like this:

• Logo Design
• Website Design (design only in .psd format)
• Website Design (design + coding into xHTML+CSS, less than 7 pages)
• Forum Skinning (design only in .psd format)
• Blog Design (design + coding into WordPress theme)

You now have your basic services listed, now it’s time to create a base project for each project. We’ll be using another handy dandy formula, this time incorporating your hourly wage, time it will take for you to complete the project, and a complexity variable. This will be used depending on the project type, and how hard or complex it is.

I use complexity levels of 1-5 for my pricing guide, but this is something you’ll have to determine. I really like logo design, and it’s easy for me, so I assign it a 1. Blog design is the hardest for me, so I assign that a 5. The rest fall somewhere in between. You’ll take the complexity level as a decimal + 1. So logo design would be .1 + 1 = 1.1. Here’s the formula:

(Hourly Wage x Estimated Time To Complete) x Complexity Level = Base Price

As an example, we’ll take a website design with coding. I assign web design + coding a complexity of 3. So it adds up to: (35 x 15 hours) x 1.3 = $682.5. This would be an odd number to quote someone, so I would round the base price down to $650, but you can round up as well.

3. Develop Prices For Any Additional Requirements

You know how your base pricing guide down. That will suffice for some (maybe most, depending on your clientèle) of your projects, but you’ll get a lot of clients wanting something special added to their site. This could be everything from a flash presentation on their homepage, to a simple login/user system.

It’s the same process for this step to determine prices for additional elements added to the project. Most additional elements will be code based, that is a script, or a web app. Again, make a list of all the additional elements you can think off, and go through the formula again deciding how much you will charge for them. Things like:

• Online Calendar App
• User login system
• Email contact form
• Flash Presentation
• Shopping Cart
• Additional Pages

For additional requirements I assign them all a complexity level of 3, and plug them into the formula from step 2. For additional pages, I charge a flat $50 fee per page the client wants past 7.

4. Develop Prices For Outsourced Work

In the first three steps, you have developed a pricing guide that will be suitable for most of your work. However there comes a time in every freelancer career when you will have to outsource some work. Maybe the client wants a custom illustration, or a big web application developed. You could try and tackle it if you wanted, but then you run into biting off more than you can chew. Nothing is more embarrassing and detrimental to your designer-client relationships than telling a client you can code “the next big thing” for them, and half way through having to tell them you can’t do it. Know your limits, and charge accordingly. Pricing outsourced work is extremely simple:

(Quote From Contractor x 1.10) = Price

You are simply taking the quote from whoever you are outsourcing the work to, and adding 10% to it.

These steps should give you a great start in developing your own freelance pricing guide. You can change pretty much everything in this to work for your needs. These formulas are very simple, and very flexible. One of the advantages, besides the obvious, of having a pre-determined pricing guide is that you can change it on the fly. Say you’re designing for a non-profit, just take the normal price x .5 to give them a 50% discount. I hope this article helped you if you were having trouble developing a pricing plan, or just had no clue where to begin. To those who already have pricing down, how do you do it? Do you have a set pricing guide, or just come up with a number on the fly for each project? I’m interested in hearing your point of view.

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