Everyone’s Talking, but No One’s Saying Anything

There is absolutely TONS of talk on the blogs about how to set your freelance rates. You will probably notice, however, that while everyone talks about how to set your rates, no one tells you what they actually charge. There are a couple of reasons for that, in my opinion:

• If you tell others what you charge, they might undercut your rates and get all your great jobs.
• Other freelancers might make fun of you for not charging enough. (There are a couple of freelancers in the blogosphere who make it their personal mission to go around berating freelancers who don’t charge enough.)
• People might think you’re too big for your britches if they learn that you’re charging three times more than they are.
• Our culture has certain taboos regarding talking about money in more than hypothetical terms.

Tamara and I have attempted to break through some of these obstacles by posting our own freelance income report each month. Of course, we didn’t do that early on when we were happy to make a couple hundred dollars a month, but that’s mostly because we hadn’t thought of it yet. We really want to try to take some of the mystique out of freelancing, so that’s why we made the decision to post those reports. When you read them, however, keep in mind that we’ve been doing this for about a year and a half, and between the two of us, we probably work a little more than 40 hours a week.

One Approach to Setting Freelance Rates

So, how do you set your freelance rates? There are tons of opinions out there on the subject. Some say that you should determine how much money you need to make and then divide that by the number of hours you intend to work to get a reasonable hourly rate. If that makes sense to you, then go for it! Other suggestions include charging a per-word or per-project fee. We use this approach quite a bit in our business. We base the rate not only on the size of the project, but also on the type of project. For that reason, we have different prices for “web content,” “ebooks,” “SEO articles,” and other types of writing.

I may get yelled at by other freelancers for disclosing this, but here’s how we got to this point: