Help me price my web-service

August 30, 2016 11:49 AM

I've been considering offering some sort of brochure-website service for small local companies for years. It's all come to a bit of a head with someone actually approaching me and requesting that I do this for them, so I guess the time is now! I have an idea of how I want to do this, but not what I want to charge. Sanity check my idea and help me price it inside.

The person wants "a webpage", we haven't had a meeting yet to discuss specifics, but she totally blew off my suggestions of helping her get started with DIY things such as Squarespace, she just wants it to work, without any particular interference from herself.

Basically I am thinking of just getting her a domain, and pointing it at a site on my own webhosting. The site would be either a Wordpress or through Hugo, and I would fix her up some webmail. I would write in our agreement that she has full right to the domain and content should she wish to change services at any time.

The client is a professional with her own company here in western Europe. She is likely billing her clients 100-125 USD-equivelant per hour. She has told me she "pays well", but I have no idea what that means. For my part I have education and experience in web dev etc, but from the start of the century. I am comfortable providing the service outlined above.

I am thinking of asking for a fixed price X for the setup and a monthly cost of Y, covering hosting, domain and 1 hour of updates per month, extra work billable at Z per hour.

1) is this a really bad idea? It feels win-win. Am I forgetting something?
2) What are X, Y and Z?

posted by Iteki to Work & Money (2 answers total)

This is a totally normal business arrangement for a freelance web designer, so with the normal freelancer caveats (are you willing to do this? Is your client someone you would like to work for? are you proficient enough that your work can be a good reflection on you for future clients?), it's a good idea. So here's how I would calculate a bare-minimum fee. This is mostly true for all freelance work.

• Figure out your hourly billing rate (Z) first. It should be somewhere around 2-3x your hourly take-home pay. It could be $50 or it could be $150. It really depends on how much you want your client, value your time, pay for your workspace, your market, etc. You can probably afford to look at the lower end of that scale since you're just getting started.
• Initial set-up should usually cover 2 or 3 graphic design concepts, with a couple iterations to the final design. Go with your gut and keep a tight leash on your client. I'd budget 8 hours for a simple-yet-custom site, with maybe an hour or two for extra setup and deployment.(X = time x Z)
• Not many clients will actually need 1 hour worth of updates a month. Two hours a year would be more my guess for a bare minimum client, which is just enough to do an occasional upgrades and check for viruses. Get an actual figure from a host for annual hosting costs. I'd charge per year. (Y = host costs + annual maintenance time x Z)

posted by Llamadogdad at 2:45 PM on August 30, 2016

I would charge $2500 for the initial design and $600/year for ongoing support and maintenance. I don't think you have to be an expert web designer or anything, but you have to be really good at responding to the client's needs.
posted by miyabo at 8:29 PM on August 30, 2016