Reply To: Starting Out as a Freelancer (Need Advice)

[Senff]

I don’t think you should be setting a fixed price per page, because this limits yourself right from the start.

What if the client wants a one-page site with a bunch of different sections and lots of content that’s going to take you 10 hours? Getting paid $100 will not be worth it.

What if they want a site with 5 pages with a design so simple that it only has a title, a little bit of text and a few images that will take you half an hour to do one template? You may be pricing yourself out if you charge $500 for that.

I would suggest you don’t set a price until you know more about the content structure and the designs. Not sure if you’ll be doing the designs yourself as well, or just the coding, but let’s say someone else is doing the designs and structuring. You should look at that first, and make an estimate of how long it would take you to develop that into a site. Once you have an idea how many hours you’ll be spending on it, you can tell the client how much you will be charging for it.

In other words, charge by the hour. You don’t want to do lots of work for $10/hour if it’s a really complex design, or charge your client $300/hour if it’s a simple site.

tl;dr — first determine how much work you’ll have to do, then put a price on the time you’ll be spending on it.