Hourly rate? Worth it?

From my experience, all clients want flat rates as:
A- they have a budget to meet.
B- so that they can abuse you with changes.

Based on that you need to use a contract to cover your ass aginst the latter, and accurately make numbers to agree with the the former also having a surplus.

It is variable how long a project will take, depending on how inspiring it is, how inspired you are, how good or bad is the raw material you are given, multiplied times the people is involved (not every firm is a one man band).

If you add to that currency fluctuation -I've got clients from Spain and US- and your fixed expenses ( I know that Tim is quite young, but most of us will like at least to pay a rent that can put you off a grand a month if you are in London ) you will find soon that £30 an hour is sort of OK.

And I forgot saying that if you are doing all legal, you will need to pay back a 20% average in taxes, so if it is a £30 gross, you are taking of only £24 of net income after taxes.

Unless you would manage to get full time contract all year through -which is not that far away of being a fulltime employee- you will find yourself far away from rich....

My bottom line is that when you see it from closer it is NEVER that simple. ; )
 
Hourly vs Flat Rate is always a tough choice, from my experience both large and small companies are willing to go either route. Hourly is usually the safe route to go and Flat Rate is normally bitter sweet. If you think a project will take you 40 hrs to complete and you quote the client $$, and you finish the project a lot sooner then you make a profit and can use that time to work on another project. At the same time, if you quote $$ for a 40 hr project and you reach 40 hrs but realize you will need more time or if the client is one of those who keep coming back with revisions its much harder for you to try to to charge hourly on top of the flat rate.
 
Just thought I would share a post by Jacob Cass on the topic of pricing yourself!

Dunno what everyone thinks of this guy but I have been subscribed to his blog for around 6 months and have found it very informative!
 
It's an old chestnut and no doubt. My personal approach over the last, what, nearly 20 years is to estimate for the entire job, but also disclose the hourly rate. The idea being that if the client keeps moving goal posts then they understand they get charged for *their* changes, over and above the original brief.

The problem is that some clients also start with no brief, and I've noticed that newbie clients expect you to write their brief for them. No problem with that, but it's a chargeable part of your professional services.

Legally, in the UK anyway, it pays to use the phrase 'estimate' rather than 'quote' as the latter is deemed more legally binding, and inflexible.

Hourly rates? The answer is made up from...
1. Whatever the current market rate is in your area
2. The rate for the level of expertise you're applying (eg. page artwork to someone else's visuals usually attracts a lower rate than 'design work')
3. The rate that the client is used to paying!! (and if you can discover that you're onto a winner!).

I have different rates for different clients, according to what they are used to paying and what kind of skills I am applying. When I'm constructing a newsletter, and copy editing/writing, and applying infometric skills I'm using tonnes more braincells than banging out some HTML tables for someone's emails ;)

So, in summary: don't be trapped into thinking black and white. There's no reason a flat-rate shouldn't also have an hourly-rate component. Some clients (fortunately they seem to be rarer than a few years ago) want you to flat-rate, and also soak up any of their changes. To me this is an onerous as doing free, speculative work. Stick to your guns, and say no. If they refuse to use you, consider that a positive. In almost all cases they would be the Client from Hell.

(Notwithstanding economic desparation, and the ultimate need to earn at least some cash...)
 
Charge whatever you feel is justafiable, If its likely to take you 10 hours charge for at least 13 incase you go over, remember your not at mcdonnalds so it wont be minimum wage, your doing a creative, specialist job and as a result an hourly wage is significantly different, accountants/solicitors usually charge upwards of £100 per hour, so asking £25-40 wont seam too bad.

I've made £500 an hour before charging for jobs and it taking far less time than I expected, On the other hand Ive made £2 an hour on jobs that I undercharged for the amount of time it took. The more you do the better you'll get at pricing jobs.
 
I've been freelance for nearly 15 years now, and in the main work for agencies. For the last 10 or so years I've been a 'regular' (that's freelance speak for 'not in the PAYE sense, Guv - honest!!') at an agency who have a MASSIVE client and I've been tasked with personally looking after them. I charge £25 an hour for turning around their artworks in minutes as opposed to hours and in that time it's a service they've been delighted with. Then around a year ago, times started getting tougher (leading up to the way they are as I type this) and it's all changed.

Whereas before, when they knew exactly what they were going to get from me - ie, whatever the size of the job, it would get done in or before the time it *should* take, with next to no amends at all required, they were happy to go for it without question, knowing they'd get a job well done. Things are now a little different; I am now required to quote up front and build in 2 sets of amends on each job. "Fair enough" I hear you say.

The only problem is that, these days, when you're dealing with account marketing managers, you're also dealing with 'designers'; a term I use very loosely - none of these 'kids' (many of which have 10 or more years' less life experience than I have) really have no clue what they are looking at when they see the end result of a job they themselves briefed in; yet they know best and are desperate to have a little play, to put their mark on it, sometimes many times over, before we get back to where we were before they got their grubby little mitts on it!

Now in the situation you can well see developing here, how the hell are you supposed to be able to quote on a job like that up front? Or rather, how do you deal with a client who will look at your invoice and then query it without any memory or hindsight of how the job could possibly have ended up necessitating 13 sets of amends (I joke not) - personally, I don't care how many times an amend comes back to me - if I have to make changes, create a PDF and send it back, that, my friends, is a minimum 15 minute block filled in on my timesheet, quid pro quo!

If a client can't be trained to brief in multiple amends at once, and I try, then tough! I quoted £50 recently to produce a poster that was being printed 4-off, ie a very low print run - It cost them nearly £300 of my time - that's before going through the agency's tariffs.

So, in answer - hourly rate is the only way to go. Be reasonable when you quote, but if the client wants to play, they should be informed at the time that it's going to cost and let them make their minds up.
 
Incidentally, I forgot to mention, that should you ever find yourself in a position where the client is most definitely right <uses sarcasm>, keep all your emails for that particular job in a separate mailbox. Then, if there are any disputes, the evidence is there. What I've had to do for two jobs in the last month is create a Word document, detailing the exact chronology of the job, including emails to and from the client, showing all the attachments, in the order they happened. Funnily enough, they paid up on seeing those...
 
Dazzer21 said:
Incidentally, I forgot to mention, that should you ever find yourself in a position where the client is most definitely right <uses sarcasm>, keep all your emails for that particular job in a separate mailbox. Then, if there are any disputes, the evidence is there. What I've had to do for two jobs in the last month is create a Word document, detailing the exact chronology of the job, including emails to and from the client, showing all the attachments, in the order they happened. Funnily enough, they paid up on seeing those...
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I’m going to keep this short. That was a great read and it’s extremely encouraging to know that even a seasoned designer like you has to put up with that nonsense from new age marketers.
Thanks for the good advice.
 
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