How to price a website project

Why does hourly pricing lose money on website projects?

• Hourly rewards slowness and penalises expertise.
• It invites scrutiny of your time instead of your work.
• It makes the number unpredictable, which is the thing clients hate most.
• It caps you at the hours in a week, which is a low ceiling.

Where this goes wrong: Replacing hourly with "day rate", which is hourly in a bigger hat. The same incentive problem applies, and the client still buys your time rather than the result.

What actually sets the price?

• Scope — what is being delivered, written down, with the edges named. Without this nothing else is meaningful.
• Cost — what the work takes you, honestly, including the bits you always forget. This is your floor, not your price.
• Value — what the result is worth to this client's business. A site that wins commercial contracts is not priced like a site that exists to look respectable.
• Risk — the unknowns you are agreeing to absorb. Legacy content, a third-party integration you have not seen, a client with four decision-makers.

Where this goes wrong: Starting at value. Pricing on value with no idea of your cost is how people sell a six-week job for three weeks' money and only find out at week five.

How do you estimate without showing your hours to the client?

• Estimate privately, in pieces, from jobs you have actually done.
• Add the invisible work — content chasing, revisions, handover, launch, aftercare.
• Add contingency against the specific risks you named, not a vague percentage.
• Show the client scope, outcome, price and dates. Nothing else.

Where this goes wrong: Sending a line-by-line cost breakdown "for transparency". It reads as an invitation to negotiate each line, and the lines they cut are always the testing and the aftercare.

Should you quote one price or three options?

• Option one — the smallest thing that solves the problem properly.
• Option two — what you would do, and say so. Most people take this one.
• Option three — the version with the growth work included, for the client who is ready.

Where this goes wrong: Making the cheapest option one you hope they do not pick. If it is not a good-faith offer, do not put it on the page.

What makes a fixed price survivable?

• Name the deliverables precisely enough that "is this included" has an answer.
• Name the exclusions explicitly. Content writing and photography are the two biggest.
• State the number of revision rounds, and what a round is.
• State what you need from the client and by when, because a late client is the most common cause of an unprofitable project.
• Quote every change before doing it. Every time, including the small ones.

Where this goes wrong: Absorbing the first three changes to keep the relationship warm. You have now taught the client that changes are free, and the fourth one will be large.

Should discovery be free?

When should you walk away from a project?

• The budget is a third of your floor and the scope is not negotiable.
• Nobody can tell you who signs it off.
• They are reluctant to put the scope in writing.
• The previous supplier is described as the whole problem, with no account of what the client contributed.
• The work is in a regulated sector — financial promotions, claims, health — and nobody has mentioned the compliance side. That is not a pricing question, it is a do-not-take-it-without-specialist-advice question.

Where this goes wrong: Pricing high to make a bad project tolerable. A difficult client at double the fee is still a difficult client, and they will take the time you needed for the good work.