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How to price your web development services

While Pricing your web development/design services as a developer or a designer is a crucial matter, it doesn't have to be confusing or even annoying anymore.

Pricing your web development should be estimated according to the value you provide to clients and your work quality.

Think of a senior web developer with proven experience and an hourly rate is $120/hr and she can do the job in 2 hours while a junior who charges $50/hr and can make it in 10 hours.

The senior could make it with high quality for $240 while the junior made it for $500 and the project may lack the high-quality code that is built-in best practices and that may even cost more hours in editing or extending the project in the future. Your client doesn't necessarily understand that and may choose the junior blindly. Even if the senior made the project, that doesn't guarantee that she low-priced her work, right? That tells us that you should be doing your work at a fixed price.

But what if the client insists on doing the job hourly?

Well then, you need to estimate the fixed price. Let's say $1000, and the needed amount of hours? let's say you will need 12 hours for that.

1000 / 12 = $83/hr, but you'll not necessarily finish it in 12 hrs so increase this rate by 10-20% and that's almost $100/hr. Tell the client this rate when needed.

This simple calculation considered your job quality and the number of hours needed only.

How do you tell that the project estimates a certain amount of dollars?

This depends on the value you provide for your client as we said. So imagine you have 2 clients.

Client A is an engineering company doing petroleum work and client B is a cafe.

Consider the annual revenue for both clients.

i.e. Client A revenue is 500 K and client B is 50 K. Let's say that your work will bring both of them a constant 20% increase in their annual revenue 50K & 5K respectively.

Then your price should be 20% of this increase, $10,000 for client A, and $1000 for client B.

You may exert the same effort for each client, but the revenue is different.

That's why you should also choose your clients wisely.

As a freelancer, you may get sick and stop working for some time and you should take this into consideration too.

Need more thoughts? I found this Web Design Business Case Study thoughtful.

I hope that helps you. Feel free to contact me for any inquiry you seek.