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what's up everybody I'm Jesse Showalter today I want to talk about how to quote a website project to a freelance client so many people have written to me and asked me how I quote projects to a do it hourly or project base how do I present it is there any hidden fees what do I do about all those things is there a method to my madness and to that I say just a tiny bit here's the big question how much do you charge for a website people might write you or email you or text you or social media you or whatever and ask you that question hey how much you charge for website for me how much you gonna do that for and that is where I use kind of a four-part equation that gets to my quote my four-part equation to get me to the outcome of what I'm actually in a quota client goes something like this overhead plus workload plus experience plus pain equals your quote I'm gonna unpack each one of those four things so you understand how to actually you know build out your quote for your clients and your projects okay number one in that equation was overhead what is overhead well if you worked out like a design agency there would be rent to pay and desks to rent and chairs and all sorts of stuff that requires you to pay on an annual kind of basis I still have overhead because if I'm gonna do freelance work I'm gonna do it right here in this office I have computer equipment that I need I have screens I have hard drives I have rent that I have to pay so even if you're working remote or freelance over whatever you still have a base cost for you to run your business so you got to put that together what does it cost for you to pay rent and pay for equipment and pay for all the things that you need and you decide what goes into that base cost but at the end of it you should have an annual base cost or an overhead for you to operate and run your business but you shouldn't stop there just covering your bare minimums is not enough that's what it takes for you to stay in business not necessarily for you to flourish or to represent the value that you bring we're going to talk about pricing structures in a second but before we get there I want to talk about your experience because that's the in part we have overhead we have experience you need to ask yourself how much experience you have in the project you're about to quote is it a educational website have you done a lot of those is it a non-profit have you done a lot of those do you have examples of them in your portfolio are they good examples I don't have a specific number that I can throw out for experience but really this is a personal question how much should this client or this project value the experience that you can bring to it how much do you feel like you could or should fairly charge for that that's a question you have to ask yourself okay the third part of this formula is workload you can't do a 100-page enterprise ecommerce site for $1000 that's just stupid there's a certain amount of work that goes into a project you also don't want to charge 50 thousand dollars for a one page landing page that has nothing but a headline in a contact form that don't make no sense either so you got to make sense out of the type of work somehow that you're doing okay so all that being said how do you find what it's worth well you have to use some sort of pricing structure there's a few really popular pricing structures out there and I'm gonna mention those now number one you have hourly number two you have project based or number three you have value based I'm gonna go through each one of them really quickly right now hourly is kind of obvious you quote a certain amount of hours that you think it's gonna take you to complete a project and then you charge an hourly rate $70 an hour $80 an hour $200 an hour whatever you think is fair per your experience and what you think is like right for you to get paid according to your overhead so you're gonna come up with an hourly figure and you're gonna charge that so I'm not a big fan of hourly if you're gonna do big projects if somebody asks you to do a one-off thing had just need this done really quickly you just charge them an hourly rate that's what I use hourly for consultation quick one-off projects that's how I kind of do that but when you start doing big projects and billing hourly the client starts feeling the weight of each extra hour that you feel like you need to spend why do you need to do research that's gonna take more hours they start thinking in that mindset and that's just not a good place to be also if you do work really really fast you get paid less that's also counterintuitive to what it should be if you have more experience in you're better at what you do so hourly that for big projects you could move to project-based which is kind of just like hourly on steroids project-based pricing is where you take your hourly rate and you look at the size of the project and you quote it really really big you don't give them your hourly rate but you internally not externally but internally are saying I think this is gonna take me a hundred hours to do and I charge a hundred dollars an hour so hey the projects about ten thousand dollars and they say well how does that all work out you say that's the price of the project I'm doing this size of work for you my caliber and experience it's gonna cost you ten thousand dollars that's the project-based pricing it's kind of just internal hourly and you get to tweak it how you want the last structural pricing projects that's called value-based pricing and it's really about the value of me as a designer or a developer that you are getting value-based pricing is really intuitive we've all actually experienced it if you go out and you buy a purse or something from Walmart versus go to a Louis Vuitton store and buy a purse there they both do the same thing right and and it's not even esses and yes the Louis Vuitton purse is probably better made and has certain qualities and materials but materials and all that aside there's a name-brand that you're kind of locking into and there's value that comes with carrying around that Louis Vuitton purse it's more expensive that brand is more expensive so if people want to work with you and you say well I'm a personal brand I bring this level of value and brand equity to any projects that I work on now you have to pay for that value as well and so I kind of break it down like value-based pricing is really project-based pricing with value dumped on top and and so that's kind of the way I look at it there's probably more complex ways to kind of break that down but it's really hey you know I'm gonna do this project in a hundred hours and I charge $100 a an hour so that should be ten thousand dollars but I have been doing projects for ten years I have this amount of you know experience and knowledge I'm gonna bring to the table I bring tation I bring all these other things and after you're done you can say that you've had this work done by me and it'll be in my portfolio so actually the price of the project is 15 or 20 as you start growing your hourly rate which is your base value based on your overhead and your experience and and and then your project based pricing your value continues to grow and that's why some people can charge twenty five thirty five fifty five alright so far we've talked about three out of the four pieces of this equation we've talked about overhead and experience and workload we've touched on pricing structures and how you figure out how to quote that workload or figure out how much it should cost and last thing we're gonna talk about is my favorite topic and that's Payne people might be out there saying like pain like I don't like what are you charging for pain what kind of pain are you talking about I'm talking about there are certain times in projects with certain clients that it's gonna be painful for you to do maybe it's a project you don't like doing maybe the client has shown that they're gonna be kind of a pain and need extra hand-holding or work you should charge for that because in the end that's gonna cost you more time more communication more frustration doing things you don't want to do maybe you're trying to move away from development and do more design somebody wants you to do development you're allowed to put a pain cost on top of that hey I don't want to do this but if you really want me I will for this amount so there's a pain cost that I tack on top of things with that being said as you apply cost to painful projects you also have the ability to reduce costs for fun and exciting projects maybe it's something you really believe in maybe it's something your heart is excited about maybe it's somebody you love or admire and respect and want to work with then you can drop the price because they're not only not painful but they are enjoyable and so you can fluctuate costs like that okay now that you've put your cost and your quote together you've figured out what your overhead is to be a successful business and cover your bare minimums you've added on your experience and your value to it you figured out what the workload is and you've also figured out if it's painful or enjoyable and you've put all that together into a project-based quote hey here's the quote here's what it will cost to go present it well that's it that's how I quote projects thanks to you guys who stuck around and watch the whole video I know it was a little bit longer but I super appreciate you guys the Washington thing from start to finish make sure you leave your thumbs up and subscribe to the channel I do lots of videos like this one so stick around and if you have questions which I'm sure you do leave them down in the comments I will respond to every single one of them I promise I hope you guys are having an amazing week designing amazing things making amazing things and quoting your projects with confidence I'll see you the next one [Music]