What the client is testing
When someone asks what you charge, they are finding out whether you know what your work is. A person who has a clear answer has clearly done this before. A person who says "well, it depends, what were you thinking" has told them something they did not want to know.
You can be flexible on price. You cannot be uncertain about it.
Three ways to price, and which to default to
Hourly. Easy to explain, easy to justify, and it punishes you for getting good. Every efficiency you gain is a pay cut. It also invites the client to supervise your hours instead of your outcomes, which is a worse relationship for both of you. Keep it for genuinely open-ended work: ongoing maintenance, "sit with our team for a day", tasks nobody can define in advance.
Project. This should be your default. The client knows the total before they commit, which is what they actually want. You keep the upside of working faster. And the negotiation moves from your time — where you always lose, because your time sounds expensive and their comparison is a salary — to scope, which is where the real conversation belongs.
Value. Price against what the work is worth to the client: a sales page for a product with known volume, a pitch deck for a funding round, packaging for a line they ship a hundred thousand units of. When it works it pays several times a project fee. Its honest limits: it needs numbers most clients will not share, it invites an argument about how much of the result was you, and it fails completely where the benefit is real but unmeasurable. Most people should not build a business on it, but should recognise the two or three projects a year where it applies.
Answering without flinching
Do not give a bare number cold. Give a range attached to scope, or ask two questions first.
A script that works: *"Projects like this usually land between X and Y, depending on how many deliverables and how many rounds of feedback. Tell me the number of pieces and the deadline and I will send you a fixed figure tomorrow."*
Then, when you do say the number: say it and stop talking. The silence after a price is not disagreement. It is a person thinking. Filling that silence — "but obviously that's flexible", "I could do it cheaper if..." — is how people discount themselves before anyone has asked them to.
"What is your budget?" is a fair question and not a trap. Answer it honestly if you have a real constraint. If a client refuses to name any range at all after two attempts, that is information about how the rest of the project will go.
The rate you get quoted for being where you are
This part is worth saying plainly, because most business advice is written by people who have never had it happen to them.
The same brand identity is three thousand pounds from a London studio and twenty-five thousand rupees when offered to a designer in Pune. The deliverable is identical. The client's benefit from it is identical. What differs is that the client is pricing your cost of living rather than the value of the asset they are buying.
Things that measurably help:
- Quote in the client's currency, or in dollars or euros. A number in a currency they do not think in gets mentally converted into "cheap".
- Price the deliverable, not your time. Once it is a project fee, the hourly comparison never happens, and the hourly comparison is where the geography argument lives.
- Lead with the outcome and the reference work. Do not open with availability, eagerness, or how quickly you can start. Those read as weakness in exactly the market you are trying to enter.
- Do not volunteer your location as a discount. You do not have to hide where you are. You also do not have to introduce it as a reason to pay you less.
- Decide deliberately whether to compete on price. Sometimes going in lower is a real strategic choice while you build references. Make it a decision with an end date, not a permanent default.
And the honest part: you will lose some of these. Some clients are shopping for cheap and no amount of framing changes that. Losing them is not a failure of the framing. It is the framing working — those clients cost more than they pay.
Raising your prices
Raise for new clients first. New clients have no anchor, so there is nothing to renegotiate.
Move in steps of 10 to 20 percent. The signal that you are due one: you are winning almost every project you quote for. A win rate near 100 percent does not mean you are excellent. It means you are under market.
For existing clients: thirty days notice, in writing, applied to the next project rather than the current one. One sentence, no apology, no essay explaining your costs. Expect to lose one or two. That is what the increase is for.
Before you move on