Have you ever said a price out loud and felt proud of it — before doing any maths at all?
I nearly did this in a tea stall conversation near my university, when the owner of a small shop asked if I could make him "one simple page" for his business. I had a number ready in my head, and it felt like real money. I am a student; $25 is not nothing to me.
Before I sent the quote, I sat down and costed the job like an adult. This post is that maths, the shock it gave me, and the three rules I now run before any price leaves my mouth.
The page that sounded so simple
One page. His shop name, some photos, a price list, a button that opens WhatsApp so customers can message him.
He said "simple" four times. I believed him because I wanted the job. What I heard was "one evening of work." What the job actually was, I only saw once I listed every piece of it — including the parts nobody mentions in the tea stall.
The quote I nearly sent
$25. Flat. For everything.
It felt fair. He gets a page, I get paid, everyone is happy. The only problem: I had priced the building of the page and nothing else — as if revisions arrive by magic and messages answer themselves.
Then I did the maths
I wrote down what a job like this really takes me, based on the small pages I have built before. Not the fantasy version. The version with my actual speed and my actual mistakes.
| Part of the job | Hours |
|---|---|
| Building the page | 3 |
| Two rounds of revisions ("make the logo bigger") | 1.5 |
| Messages back and forth | 0.75 |
| Fixing my own mistakes | 1 |
| Total | 6.25 |
$25 ÷ 6.25 hours = $4 an hour.
Four dollars an hour. For work that needs a laptop, electricity, internet, and the small pile of skills I spent a year collecting from free videos at midnight. A rickshaw puller on my street has a clearer pricing model than I nearly did. 😅
I sat with that number for a while. Not because $25 is small money to me; it is not, and pretending otherwise would be a lie. The problem was different. There is a small price and there is a wrong price, and this one was wrong because I had arrived at it by asking "what sounds fair?" instead of "what does the work cost?" Those two questions feel similar in a tea stall. They are not similar at all.
What I got wrong (besides the price)
The uncomfortable part: that table is still generous to me. When I rebuilt a practice page for fun last month, I rebuilt the top section 3 times because it "didn't feel right." Nobody asked me to. That is my scope creep, billed to nobody, and on a paid job it would have come straight out of those 6.25 hours.
I also nearly forgot that "two rounds of revisions" is optimism. Clients do not experience their own feedback as rounds. They experience it as Tuesday.
The quote I actually sent
I landed on $60, and I did not just send the number. I sent the shape of the job with it, in plain words: the page itself, two rounds of changes included, delivery in four days, and anything beyond the second round of changes priced separately.
Run the same maths and $60 over 6.25 hours is about $9.60 an hour. That is not rich. It is not even impressive. But it is a number I can say out loud without flinching, because it came from the work instead of from my fear of hearing no. And if a third round of revisions arrives, it no longer comes out of my pocket by default. It has a price, agreed before it exists.
The 3 rules I quote by now
Rule 1: Count the invisible hours first. Messages, revisions, and fixing my own errors are not extras — on a small job they were 3.25 of my 6.25 hours. If a cost is not in the table, it comes out of my pocket.
Rule 2: Quote for the whole job, never for the building. The build is the part clients can see, so it is the part beginners price. The job is everything around the build. Price the job.
Rule 3: If the hourly maths embarrasses me, raise the price or decline politely. A clear, friendly "that is below what I can do it for" protects the relationship better than a desperate yes followed by slow, resentful work. The shop owner respects a straight answer. Most people do.
I sent a higher quote in the end — with the hours explained, in plain words, no drama. Whatever he decides, I would rather lose a job at the quoting stage than win one at $4 an hour.
What did your first client pay you — and what did it really work out to per hour?
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