How much to charge?

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It’s very frustrating to read responses to questions about pricing because the answers are inevitably that “it depends.” I understand that, but still it would be nice to have some examples of what others have done and what they charged or would charge for a particular website.

I am new to making websites, but have a background as a professional photographer and am reaching out to photography customers who need new websites.

One of my customers is interested in going forward with a project. Their present site is very old and and dated. It’s about six pages–a typical “brochure” static website.

I’m thinking what I would like to charge to do something similar but better would be around $2,500. I’m basing that amount on what I’ve charged them for photography in the past. In fact, this amount is very low compared to what I would charge for a photography assignment that would take so much time.

Anyway, I would be interested in what others would say would be a “$2,500 website.” If you could link to examples of what you think are websites in that price range I would really appreciate it.

Also, I’m trying to think ideas for upselling them to a $5,000 website. They are a fairly large business and employ 100 people and do $11 million in sales, so they can afford it. But they are mainly interested in having a “presence” and will not be doing any direct selling from their site. At any rate, I’m also looking for ideas to do something for them that is more than a typical static “brochure” type of site, if possible.

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Idea of price from my perspective. How much value are you providing to your client? At the business size you describe above I would add a bit to the price I would charge for the same site for a non profit or a mom and pop.
I recently gave a proposal for $6000. for a site but it was rejected as too high.
I did a Website for Wellspringnow.com for $2000.00. Keep in mind that all content for this site was provided to me. I did no writing or photography. I did have to optimize image size(photoshop and tiny png.com), but I was provided with high quality jpeg and .mp4 files. I built the site in Word Press at the request of the client. It is far too symmetrical for my taste but the client is always right, yes.

https://avnm.sbhwebdesign.com/ was built with Adobe Muse in 2016. I would need at least $4000.for a site with this many pages. Again all content was provided to me. I processed (optimized) all images. Not all were given to me as high quality. Some were quite low quality.

https://mscampbellssillygooses.com/ is about $2500. Built in Adobe Muse. I did the Illustration for the goose crossing. Photoshop and tiny png images that were provided by the teacher. She never did get back to me with images for the second school.
https://janeyspottery.com/ High quality images were provided to me. I wrote what little text there is. $2,500. is the minimum I charge for an ecommerce site. Goes up from there.
http://patriciasbodysynergy.com/ This word press site has the problems many themes have. One problem is the display of the main page image on mobile devices. Anyway, $2500.
Look up pricing design work on You Tube. There are many good discussions on this subject. Hope this helps.

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Thank you Steven. That was very helpful.

I’m encouraged now to see if I can figure out a way to make this more than a $2,500 project, while of course being fair to my customer.

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Here’s a recent video on the topic.

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Thanks but that video doesn’t address charging by the job. I’m looking for something more concrete, such as jobs that have been completed and what was actually charged, or what someone would charge to do a website they could link to. I don’t intend to charge by the hour, but by the job.

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@Steven_Harris, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m very impressed by what you managed to charge for those sites. I’d be interested to work with a salesman like you. If you’d be interested in a partnership, I’d be ready to give fantastic commission on every sale. Drop me a PM if this is something that would work for you !

Regards,
Pascal

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@vernon, the truth is, what you’d charge for a site would really depends of the work you need to put in… If you don’t want to charge by the hour, then apply a day rate and take into account what software/hardware my be required to do the job.

Everything is about content :

  • what content do you need : text / images / drawings / videos / photos

  • who is providing that content : you or the customer ?

  • what level of post-production is need on that content : none or days ?

To give you an example, I recently build a small 5 pages website for a client, mainly being used as a landing for Google Ads campaigns, so it has a contact form, nice pictures, some text and logos n the main page, and the other 4 pages are mainly legal copy. The customer provided the images and most of the copy, so I charged him $1000 for that. It was a quick job.

On another hand, for a similar amount of pages, I had a project that required a professional photo shooting, video shooting (on ground and by drone), about 3 days of photo and video post-production for that, original graphics and copy as well as a more advanced tech setup with third party integrations. Then all had to be translated in another language. Price for this was $9000, and I think it’s fairly good value…

If you want to be fair to your customer, be clear about the amount of work required for the project. Offering cheap options is good, but make sure they don’t eat up all you time and that you can still earn enough to live.

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It’s a conundrum that we all face as freelancers and as businesses.

One approach I like to take is value based pricing.

If you charge by the hour, then you penalise yourself as you get better and quicker at doing certain tasks. Then when you put your hourly rate up, clients can become resistant to it. So you either end up making less, or charging them for the time that “it would” of taken you (which I don’t do on principle).

Whereas if you determine with the client exactly what kind of value a new website is going to add to their business, i.e. how many leads do they get daily or weekly through the current site, how much business do they generate overall and how much do they want to increase that by. What’s their average gig / client worth to them. etc. Why do they want the website updating.

How is the work you’re going to do going to add value to their business, specifically?

Then there’s the case of putting a brief and a spec document together, where will content be provided from, what kind of functionality and features does it need, how long is it all going to take? Are you offering them 1 design concept or 5? How many revisions? Are you charging extra for hosting and managing the site? All of these things factor in to the cost.

It’s like asking “how much is a car?”. It’s all subjective, so for me to say one website is worth $5k and another $2k is really nonsense. The one for $2k might of made a business $200k, and the one for $5k might of made it $-4k.

You might not necessarily want to take responsibility for the design and build if you’re new to it and if the client is high value. You could work out a good rate with them based on the above (or, even better, find someone who can handle that who has more experience) and then hire an expert to take care of the design and build. The client is happy, you’ve made some profit on top and they have a tool that’s likely going to be a lot more effective, which will do wonders for your reputation.

As opposed to taking it on, charging above what you can realistically deliver and potentially disappointing or alienating the client completely when they come across this post you’ve made… Which if I’d of seen, as the client, I’d probably be running.

It’s your job as a creative to be straight and honest with the client. I’ve been there and made that mistake, so be cautious with how you approach it.

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These were sales that I made face to face with clients in Las Cruces, NM. I got to this point after years of networking in my local community and paying for membership to my local chambers of commerce. And you have to consider that I also provide added benefits. See “included with handcrafted sites.” at https://sbhwebdesign.com/services.
I am not sure how this will work long distance.

Also it helps that I am selling myself. Something I believe in. I am not sure that I could sell as well for someone else.

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Hi @Steven_Harris

Just to say, your link is producing a ‘404’ so maybe there’s a typo somewhere.

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Thank you @StuM . fixed on Webflow now. Come see after I fix exported site.

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@JoeMillion Absolutely value based NOT hourly. Absolutely hire out to others with more experience than you if you are unfamiliar with an aspect of the total project OR JUST TO NETWORK with others who might help you get work in the future. Your relationships with other creatives as well as business persons (who might or might not be your clients) are paramount to your career. Your reputation and who you know are EVERYTHING.

This is THE QUESTION for value based pricing. You gain this information by talking to the client BEFORE you give them a price.

@JoeMillion What post are you referring to?
@JoeMillion

ABSOLUTELY TRUE! Honesty in business pays well in the end. You are in it for a career not to fly by night

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@vernon I’ve found it’s not worth getting frustrated about. You have to find your own self worth. I’m not sure what you want to hear, there really are so many variables, so it DOES depend on a lot.

I’ve charged £3000 that others would charge £1000 for and others would charge no less than £15,000 for. There is no price for a website other than what you want to charge. It really IS that simple.

The more you believe in your own skill and talent, the more you can give a price and look someone dead in the eye when you drop that figure. Sure, they can go and build their own with Wix for $7 a month. Tell them that.

I have ZERO interest in what other designers are charging, others would look at my work and think “Wow, he got paid for THAT?” I don’t care because their opinions are not going to pay my bills. I’ll always take constructive criticism on board, that’s how you grow.

Charge what YOU believe you’re worth. @Ran_Segall has this amazing tool and another million articles about pricing here: How Much Should I Charge? - The nuSchool

Work out how your website will value them. If they have $11m in sales, then a pro freelancer is going to be going for £10k - £30k + and saying “this is how the website will generate x,y,z extra income for you, £30k is a drop in the ocean for what this website will do for you”.

Do something you’ve never done before, and go high. You might not regret it! :wink:

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Hi @Steven_Harris

I think Joe was referring to the fact that Webflow forum posts are publicly searchable and will easily show up on Google, not everyone realises that you don’t need to login to find/read things, just to post/reply.

cc @JoeMillion @vernon

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Thanks! good to know!

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I totally agree with @magicmark in that confidence is half the battle in pricing work.
I firmly believe that you do get what you pay for in this (design) life.

I tell my branding clients , “you can go get a"logo” from 99design for $600. You can even pay for the “platinum” service for $2500… you’re still getting some version of a template. If you want the proven experience of an agency that has created social media loved brands that do $25 million a year in sales… we’re happy to help. But it’s not gonna cost $2500"

Pick a price and be confident in it. Have the knowledge of the value good design brings to back it up.

How do you do that?
Show them their competitions website that is better designed / more readable / more user friendly. Tell them you’ll make a site that will blow it theirs out of the water

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There is no right or wrong answer here, but do your numbers ( how much I need to to pay rent , internet , computer maintenance) and once you do that think about how much you want to earn and how much value you can give to your clients. Think about how skilled you are because you can find people that charge 500 per hour but you Can imagine what you get for that price.

https://youtu.be/-C01FC27Jg0

This video always helps

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We at webflowdeveloper.com simply charge on how much value we can bring to and sustain the client with. For simple tasks we have simple al a cart pricing, for consultation and execution of larger solutions it depends on the needs of the specific company. Listen to your client and solve the problem, help them shape an honest budget, don’t use their entire budget, don’t worry about the amount of money upfront but the value of your work for that company/your client. Good work will bring more good work, over priced projects and unhappy clients won’t bring anything. Don’t under Charge and charge what you are worth but be honest.

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My pitch as a graphic designer is to offer a website and corporate identity in tandem. For this, I would charge 6-9k (3-4 weeks work). What I am really after is to build a relationship where I can manage the site over many years as well as offer design services as and when required. So be generous upfront, to win that relationship - set a fixed fee upfront, if it takes longer so be it.

There seems to be plenty of designers who offer to make a site in WordPress for less than 1k - i’ve no idea how this can be profitable unless you go for volume.

With Webflow - the key attribute is the custom cms, and that there are no third party plugins to constantly worry about, so I always build my pitch around that. I also create custom ‘how to use webflow cms’ guides as pdfs for them, Funny though, however simple it may be, and however much control users claim they want, they always seem to need help and come back to me.

So I think, you have to be wise, be a little generous in the beginning to build the trust and the relationship. Over the years this can lead to greater income - as well as more meaningful design!

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I wouldn’t worry about “price”. Instead, think cost/benefit and value. If you can identify the benefits to them and assign a value, you’re way ahead of the game.

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