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How do you charge for your services?

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Messages count : 3
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Registration : 29 October 2009
Contact in PM
Hi.. I’m new here.. been freelancing for a while and consistently I’ve come up against the same question: How to charge for my services?

A lot of clients, especially the non-savvy, seem to expect to ‘buy’ a website off the shelf and walk off with it. In my experience this just isn’t how it works though.

A website needs to be maintained, upgraded, SEO’d… the list goes on. Then there’s hosting per year. Many clients are surprised by these charges, and the usual response I get is that they’ll arrange their own hosting and save some cash thank you very much. Which leads to my next issue.

If you’re coding to high standards, this means you’re writing re-usable code. The sites I’ve made, while bespoke to an extent, all use the same core set of functions/modules I’ve written. In fact it’s more than that, it’s a mini-CMS. So when I make a site for someone, I include all that code. But this is code I’m going to re-use, it’s not strictly ‘theirs’, it’s my livelihood, and I don’t want them walking off with it.

Charging a one-off fee and nothing more isn’t very sustainable as a career model, but I find setting up some sort of ‘lease’ or monthly/annual fee puts people right off. I guess it all boils down to contracts and making people understand what they’re buying, what they own and what to expect from me.

So, what do you do?

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