Freelancers and consultants, what are your rates?

Occasionally I get inbound emails from "expert networks" who have clients doing research, and they want my expert opinion on something. I tell them I charge $1100/hour. I've had a couple of them bite, put me on a call, and pay me quite promptly.

Back in the day as a web developer, I charged $125/hr for full-stack web design. I had some clients pay me that rate for 40-60 hours/week, for months on end. It was great money, especially as a 27-year-old.

If I were to do consult now, I'd charge weekly or monthly, not hourly. And I would tell clients they're paying for a particular valuable solution or business outcome, not for my time. Can't say what the rate would be, but ideally something where I could make >= $2M/year working less than 10 hours/week. That's what I'd aim for, anyway. Might take me a while to get there. Sounds crazy, but it's doable if you have the right credibility + pitch + niche.

Hey @maaike,

You may get some relevant numbers if you're up for sharing the type of work you're looking at but here are some ideas (I'm based in the US):

When I first started freelancing I would simply charge per project (1-2 years experience). I was still learning, making a ton of mistakes, and super slow so charging hourly didn't seem right 😆. I would often charge 1-3K USD to build websites or simple web apps.

Later on I moved to hourly rates as I got stuck in endless revisions with clients. Note to younger self: the cheaper the project the more revisions you can expect. 😅

I then made the jump to building web + mobile prototypes and went back to per project pricing, but this time set the base project price at 10K+ USD (3-5 years experience). Much better clients, much less revisions. Of course you can only command decent rates once you've successfully completed some projects, have happy clients, and have nailed your processes and workflows.

Lately I've taken on a few projects but no longer do hourly or per project rates. Instead, I simply charge a flat weekly rate, usually in the range of 3-5K USD per week (I now have 15+ years experience). It's dramatically simpler (no complicated contracts, statement of work, etc) and it ensures the client is engaged and keeping things moving.

Hope that helps!

I'm currently charging $475/month - this gives my customers up to 4 hours of weekly pro-active consulting. That translates to a minimum of $27.3/ph - which is way below my usual rate of $50/ph for long-commitment marketing consulting. The main difference is, that this is minimum, that I really like my work, it's productized, and that this is a recurring income - it gives me stability!
I'm helping technical founders to grow their products and make them visible to their target audience. It's rather a unique service (Marketing Manager on Demand) - since I'm both a marketer and developer, so I understand and can serve this niche well.

To have enough money that I don't need to stress about it, I need to make $3,5K/month (7 customers).
I have 9 customers now, so I can save some money already! I plan to reach 10 customers before I'll close my services to new customers (so one more!), meaning I'll work a maximum of 40 hours a week while maintaining a healthy overhead of 20%.

Let me know if you have any questions!

My consultancy is: https://DevelopersVsMarketing.com

Which websites do you use to secure clients like this?

I've been freelancing for the past 4 years. In the beginning, it was peanuts compared to now. Example: I was charging about $10 per hour for a year and a half. Than $40 and now I charge upward of $100 per hour. However, I often charge by the project so on a per hour basis it tends to go higher than $100.

I think it is just about if you can provide value. Companies, at least good one, have the capabilities and willingness to pay your price so long as you can provide results.

Hey @maaike! I just started doing productized pricing for my agency services so I have this fresh in my mind.

Also just wrote a post on the thought process too.

In short my goal was to make my pricing and deliverables easy to plan for financially for bootstrapped/early-stage founders (my current target audience) while giving them ROI as soon as possible.

For the client its great because:

• Questions answered up front (de-risked)
• Spread out the cost over several months vs a lump sum
• Quick Obvious ROI & deliverables

For me it's great because:

• Puts me in a sales sweet spot ( love helping people, i hate "sales" calls)
• Makes cash flow and PM easier
• Gives us the chance to test each other out and get comfy
• puts them in a subscription mindset - which works well if they want to pay me to manage their marketing afterwards

When it comes to consulting, I take a couple fractional CMO clients every quarter (my min is 3-6mon contracts for CMO work, and my longest one is 2years) and my pricing starts at $800/mo for 4hrs of meetings and 4hrs of strategy help + Equity on a sliding scale depending on company stage. The larger the company the higher the fee because it takes more strategy time and planning.

My hourly rate is $150 (i used this handy freelancer rate calculator months ago to help me determine it) so it's cheaper than booking 8 individual sessions (and I don't offer split up strategy work hours under anything else).

It's easier mentally and more secure financially knowing that the client and I are meeting regularly and then I can plan out goals and topics to cover.

that's the only thing I do hourly on. Everything else is project based.

Web developer FT and freelance on the side, right now focusing on bring non-wordpress sites to Wordpress (not sure why, but these are the jobs that found me.

My freelance rate is $65 US per hour. I work to get my jobs done under quoted hours, so ACTUAL rate per hours worked is closer to $100US.

I actually charge a PER PROJECT fee though, but it's vaguely based on the Hourly rate I stated above.

I'm currently indie hacking full time, but I was freelance for about 13 years prior. Rates are really dependent on your experience level, service and client. The last few years I was targeting a day rate of $2k for full-stack web development - but that may be fairly unrealistic depending on your situation. It took me years to build up the client base and reputation to charge that much.

I always charged per-project if I could help it. It simplifies the client relationship considerably, prevents some annoying conversations and gives the right incentive to complete jobs efficiently. The only caveat is that you must make sure the project scope is extremely clear and written down in a signed contract. Get that contract signed before you do any work, every time. You'll be saving yourself a lot of trouble down the line.

I charge per project and that is the way to go if you want to increase your earnings.

If you're a designer, check out Chris Do and the Futur for solid business advice. If not, Jonathan Stark is a great alternative.

Anywhere between $123 to $200 an hour.
However it makes sense to create project-based pricing, based on the value you deliver to your customer, for example:
let's pretend you're working on a content strategy piece for a SaaS company who's base tier is worth $49 a month.

This strategy you're giving your customer will allow them to 2x an 3x their traffic in 6-12 months.

If they currently convert 1% of their audience reading the content and make for example 20 hot leads per month, you're basically allowing them to get 40 to 60 leads per month, a year from now.

therefore you might be spending 10-20 hour worth of work but you're allowing your customer to gain 2 or 3 times more sales/demos/whatever. that's 2x more $49/month users if not more.

20 * $49 = $980 acquired MRR without doing anything
40 * $49 = $1960 MRR
60 * $49 = $2940 MRR

You're basically allowing your customer to make more money in 2 months than what they paid you for 10-20 hours of your time. (assuming they eat the cost of producing the content)

A year later, after month 3 - they recuperated the cost of paying you and now benefitting fully from your content strategy.

Thus, you shouldn't charge $1000 or $2000 - because you're going to allow your customer to make a lot of money - the value you delivered to them is immense compared to what you charged.

As long as you can show this data to your customer, you can seal the sell of your services

Hope this example is clear enough

I usually charge per-project and depending on the complexity/how much I enjoy the project. Averaging across all projects, my hourly rate is around $65 (but consider the fact that I live in a country where many people make this amount in 2 days). So it really depends on your cost-of-living as well.

I do freelance development on the side and usually avoid going below $100/hour. But I know many friends who are serious about freelancing charge way more.

I do full-stack development with Django/Vue.

I have one client that pays me $400/day (so $50 an hour) and other one that's more pay-as-you-go model for $80 an hour.

I used to do monthly financial break downs on my personal blog so check it out if you're interested.

Charging per project AND regarding the potential amount of $ the service will bring to the table for my client.

I do $50 per hour nowadays, it's pretty cool since I am 22 and live in Greece where developers get paid peanuts.

Mostly work on Upwork but have been expanding lately to other networks like braintrust and looking to increase my rates about 30% in a few weeks.

I have been doing full stack 5 years now and my expertise ranges from development work / design / talking to customers / brand building etc... Building startups has really helped me show an amazing portfolio with a lot of achievements and work behind them. I also really push the fact that I am experienced enough to build really fast and learn really fast.

The goal for the coming year would be to increase to $100+ per hour but hopefully one of my projects takes off before then to be honest.

I do freelance work as a virtual assistant for solopreneurs (mainly coaches) and started my rates at $50/hr. I'm just getting started and wanted to get comfortable with my value before increasing it.

Hey @maaike,

I wrote a bit about this not too long ago in this post here

I'd say it mostly depends on how far into your journey you are and the business relationship you have with your clients.

In some of the comments I also talked about moving toward "value based" pricing, fixed rate work, etc.

I hope this helps.

This past year I've dipped my toes into the freelancing and consulting waters to cover my living expenses and I build my own products.

Here's my pricing history (with context):

Company A (Contract work - frontend development):

• Through my network I met a guy building a startup (he was solo at the time). We got along well and he decided to hire me to help with his UI.
• We priced it per project, but roughly the pricing we agreed upon was $1k per week (based on mutually agreed upon estimates)

Company B (Contract work - custom web app development):

• This company was an established company (10 years) that had no developers, the owner automated everything with Zapier (super impressive), but he needed help scaling beyond that.
• To start, he hired me on a $500/mo retainer and I devoted about 1-3 days work per month on setting up a webhooks server for his business
• After the first project went well, I was actually looking for more stable income to cover my living expenses ($3-4k/mo). He had a bigger project for me so he hired me at $4k/mo to work on a custom web app for him with 50% of my working hours.

Fiverr (Hourly career coaching): - Note: I was wanting to help people starting out in their tech careers so I intentionally priced this lower

• I started out charging $50/hr (but Fiverr takes a 20% cut)
• Demand got too high, so I gradually increased it to $90/hr

Hey, you should consider the productized service model. Just do one service, at scale.
Bret from Designjoy has some good insights into this.

Hey, I'm currently charging $1500 for one video at Videodeck. https://videodeck.co/
We do just one type of videos, and we do it at scale.

We actually encourage scale in our pricing model. If you were to buy 10 videos you would pay half (per video) as you would for just buying one.

This works for us since doing multiple videos at once saves us time and resources. Plus it's a way to filter out clients that are not really interested in doing long-term work.

I wrote more about it here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/we-turned-our-video-production-side-project-into-an-8k-mmr-productized-service-in-just-3-months-021d0b8c83

Can we get a "poll" format IH? Thanks :-)

$125/h - Data analysis.

I just started offering a Data Analysis monthly subscription, ideal for Small/Medium sized businesses that don't want to hire a full time Analyst bust still want the benefits of having one "on call" - offering this for 2499/m

This is a really good question. Since I am considering going back to consulting I was wondering the same myself. Back in the day, I used to charge USD 50-70/per hour, and now I see it is too low for that kind of work from what other people say. What is interesting is that with that low rate client(s) were still unhappy.

Seems less you charge more frustration and unhappiness you get. Opposites are attracting each other(in this case low rates, and unhappy people)

I'm a UI/UX Designer and currently charging from $40 to $75 per hour.

The reason why this amount fluctuates is due to the type of client I'm working on, some clients might give you more recurring work at a lower rate so that it just justifies the lower end, while other ones might engage for shorter periods of time and willing to pay on the higher end (usually for more strategic work).

As long as ROI, if you work remotely and you are fast ad efficient with your time you can surely create situations where even on the lower tiers you can make a good amount at the end of the month.

$120/hour, it's what people who do what I can do will roughly charge.

my rate = why I don't have clients.

As freelancer/consultant:
-$100-150/hr as developer at minimum.
-$250-500/hr as product management/business/tech research consultant.
-$900-1200/hr as security consultant.

Via corporate:
-The company charged $520/hr. (for 9 months of work)

My rate also highly depends on the project and client. Some require more advisory than others.

Hello @maaike you may want to check Upwork and Glassdoor to get more information about each skillset and the hourly price range for it.

Mine is about $65 (£50 in UK), although I think it should be double that realistically. At some point I'll make the jump!

Apart from retainers, I don't usually quote on an hourly. I will do fixed price projects or a daily rate.

I'm a freelance dev and only do it to supplement a full time job. My advice is to work out how many hours you want to work, and how much you want to earn a year. Do the maths and you've got the hourly rate you're happy to work for, or at least a goal to reach!

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