Freelance Calculator

[chickenfish13]

Hey guys. Came across this calculator through David Airey's blog, and thought it looked pretty legit. I'm not actually freelancing yet though, so I wanted to post this and see if this is an accurate starting point.

Thanks

Calculator Article

[leggman01]

chickenfish - i can't vouch for anything other than the math - from a purely mathematical standpoint, that's a good way to go about setting up your hourly rate - the key, and he touched on this a bit, is accurately estimating your time once you set the hourly rate - i've got an mba and my dad frequently consults with me on jobs that he bids (he's not in the design industry, but the concept is the same) - he consults with me because he thinks (incorrectly) that my mba makes my opinion more valuable than his - every time he loses money or falls short of net revenue projections, it's because he has underestimated the time it takes to complete the work - having an accurate idea of how long a project will take is key - also, as the author said, every designer has different needs, costs, etc. - someone who is doing design work as a side gig probably doesn't need the example salary of $40K and probably doesn't have overhead of $35K, and probably views any work he/she gets as "profit", so that designer is going to come to a number much smaller than $75 per hour calculated in this example - if you wanted to clear $5,000 (assuming 30% tax liability) and had $1,000 in overhead while working 5 hours per week, you would charge around $30 per hour

while i understand the concept of not undercutting yourself from a pricing standpoint, another important thing to consider is the nature of the business you are designing for...you don't want to lose an opportunity to get a job (unless you KNOW you will replace that opportunity with something as or more lucrative) by pricing yourself out - to use a sports example, a large state-supported d1 school with 20,000 students and 100,000 alumni in a medium sized city where its logo will be licensed to multiple local vendors has much more revenue generating potential than a 500 student, d3 women's college with 10,000 alumni - in my mind, those two logo packages should be priced very differently, even if they both take the same amount of time/work - if you feel pretty good about the d1 gig coming on the horizon, maybe you should price the d3 bid at the d1 price...but you've probably priced yourself out of the d3 gig - if the d1 gig doesn't come through, now you've got neither