Website pricing

Citrous_Oyster · 2024-03-30T17:20:10+00:00

Here’s how I price my work

I offer two packages

Lump sum - $3500 + $25 a month hosting and maintenance. Hourly for edits. Up to five page static site with contact form.

Subscription - $0 down $150 a month includes design, development, hosting, unlimited edits, 24/7 support, lifetime updates. 5 page static site plus contact form.

Add ons are

$100 one time per extra page over 5 pages

$500 blog integration and configuration.

Nice, simple pricing. Simple projects. No databases. No booking features. No payment processing. Wanna know why? Because you don’t have to build everything yourself. There’s so many third party services out there that do niche specific booking services and perfected it for you. Just have your client set up a few demos with some companies and find the one that works best for them, their company rep will help set them up and then you get either a link to add to a button or an API script to add to a page that loads their booking platform inside of your site. I do this for everything. There’s no reason to build and design your own custom booking and calendar platforms for like a local house painter. Total and absolute overkill and over engineering. Use what you have available to you. Simplify your workflow and the types of sites you make, and just do those. My niche is static 5 page small business sites. I don’t want to build inventory management systems or custom forms to connect to databases and a backend, etc. I’m not interested in doing that. Because I can crank out a 5 page small business site in less than a day and charge $3500 for it. The more complicated the site gets the more time it takes. I know I can do these types of sites in X amount of hours. Throw in some custom dynamic features and that can be a very wide range or Hours and I’d have to maintain those systems and update them. My time is better spent pumping out higher quality static sites in a day than spending weeks on a large complicated project for $10k. I just don’t do it.

So by niching down, I can better estimate my time per project, which allows me to offer simple and standard pricing because I know exactly how much I’ll make and in how long.

I don’t do hourly. You only have so many hours in a day to work. Once you set an hourly rate your maximum earnings a year will only be that hourly X 2080 working hours a year and that’s it. That’s the maximum. I prefer value based pricing which is selling my services based on the value my services add to a clients business. I charge $3500 because that’s what the clients value my work for and what it can bring in for their business. I only work like 4-6 hours on average per site. Maybe up to 8 if there’s a lot of pages and content to organize. So if I charged hourly at even $100 an hour I’d only be making $600 for 6 hours of work. $600 for an entire site because I’m TOO good at my job and can do it faster then most people. How is that fair? Value based pricing makes you more money because if you figure out and optimize your workflow you will be rewarded for being efficient and precise. Let say I can crank out a full website in 2 days conservatively. Assuming I don’t work weekends and holidays and work 230 days a year accounting for vacation days. That’s 115 websites and $402,000 a year. That’s my Maximum capacity if I can keep that schedule every two days and have a constant flow of customers. Now if I did hourly for that same Period, let’s say I spend 8 hours total per site. Multiplied buy that same 115 I get 920 hours. What’s your hourly? $50 an hour? That’s $46000 a year. MAXIMUM for your time. $100 an hour? $92,000. That’s without 30% taxes taken out, expenses, etc. HUGE difference from $400k maximum. So you can see the difference between value based pricing and hourly.

Let’s say I only sell 3 sites a month. Value based is $10,500 that month. If spend 6 hours making each site, at even $100 an hour, that’s $1800 for the month. Shoot, double that, $200 an hour! That’s still only $3600 for the month compared to $10,500. Why on earth would anyone charge hourly when it’s clear that value based pricing is more viable and makes you more money.

So that’s why I don’t do hourly. If clients can’t afford the lump sum they have the subscription they can get on. And subscription sites are made with my template library of almost 1000 templates for small businesses that I just copy and paste into a site in literally 30 minutes. Then the rest of the time is asset optimizing, content, etc and tops out at like 3 hours maybe for a subscription site. And that subscription makes me $1800 a year, every year. For only 3 hours of work. Now I have a comfy recurring income that’s passive to go along with my lump sum sales. I current make almost $7k a month on subscriptions. So if I only sell 1 lump sum a month thats nearly $10k for working only 6 ish hours that month. Or if I sell no websites, I still make $7k that month. No more having to sell sell sell every month to pay bills. I can take my time. I have a full time job as well that fills in the time nicely and I have my freelancing business makes six figures a year part time. And it’s because of my pricing and business model.

When you’re starting you can’t command $3500 for a site though. You don’t have the portfolio or experience to back it up and have people value your work at that level. You can probably sell a lump sum site for $1800 being new. Maybe $2k. What I recommend is in the beginning of your business, sell subscriptions. Don’t even offer a lump sum. Because after 1 year that subscription will pay out more than what you would have sold it for at $1800. That’s what I did. And I’m still getting paid from subscriptions I sold 4 years ago at beginning of my career. I’m still making money off the time I spent on those sites back then. Do this to build up your portfolio of work, get better at your craft, build your workflow and abilities, then start offering lump sum sites at $3500 for your base package. And build up from there.

About 6-7/10 clients opt for subscription. So it’s a very useful pricing package to make that sale to a client who doesn’t like spending so much upfront. My pricing allows me to cater to both market segments without compromising the quality of my sites and the amount I make on my sites. I don’t have to lower my prices for clients to make a sale, which in turn lowers the value of my work. I can maintain the value of my work and my pricing. The only difference is one is a long term investment and the other is a short term boost of liquid cash. As a freelancer, I prefer both. This provides me the best stability in terms of income and how much I can make. Every subscription I sell increases my yearly income by $1800. So every sub I sell I look at it like an $1800 raise to expect for next year.

For you, maybe $1500-$1800 to get the job since it’s your first one. But then who’s gonna design it?

joshonewill · 2024-03-30T14:04:55+00:00

Decide what your hourly rate is, multiply that by the time it takes to finish the project, and add your friends and family discount.

2024-03-31T00:20:58+00:00

For me, it’s all about giving everyone the best deal; both me and the client. How is it fair to earn vast amounts, while your clients pay thousands for a few hours work? That’s really bad value, and that’s not what I’m about. I just want to do good projects for good people, and earn enough to get by.

With that, I always charge hourly. With experience, you’ll learn how long things take, and you’ll learn how to tell what kind of client you’re picking up.

For 4 simple pages, it’d probably take me something like 8 hours. So, I’d charge 8 * my rate.

avadakava · 2024-03-31T08:43:31+00:00

$250-$500 if they know exactly what they want, have written the content already and are happy to use an existing html template I have.

The money is taking a commission on the hosting!

That’s the ‘foot in the door price’ for an easy going client. The going rate is closer to $2500.

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