Pricing Design Work
Strategies to master design pricing and increase your earning potential
Design pricing is a tricky subject to delve into as it can be challenging to price design. even designers with decades of experience still struggle from time to time when it comes to pricing their work and services. there are a lot of factors that can influence the pricing for your design work, I’d be touching on a couple of such factors; including your positioning as a designer, your skillsets and level of experience, your goals as a designer, where you live in the world (assuming you work with local clients), the quality of clients you work with.
Nailing your positioning as a designer
your positioning as a designer highly influences the quality of clients that are attracted to you and how much they end up paying for your design work and services. it all depends on how positioned you are as a designer. some are positioned as highly skilled and experienced for example; Daryl Gin of Endless Studio, Brett from Design Joy (there’s so much controversy surrounding how much money he makes), and James Mcdonald of wireframe.co, Oguz Yagiz of Lue Studio, MDS of Shift Nudge, Dann Petty, etc. As a result of their strong positioning, these designers always attract high-quality clients and make thousands and even millions of dollars yearly working as freelance designers. You can position yourself by sharing your work online using different platforms like Twitter, Linkedin, Dribbble, Behance, and most recently layers.to. the more consistently you share your work, the more positioned you are in clients' minds. the quality of work you share impacts your positioning and the clients you attract. you can also position yourself as a niche designer in different industries: you can be positioned as a web3 designer, a fintech designer, an Edutech designer, or a logistics designer, you can do this by the projects in these industries you share or have in your portfolio.
Skillsets, expertise, and level of experience
Skillsets, expertise, and how many years of experience you have as a designer directly impact your self-confidence and how much you’re comfortably able to charge clients. However, there are edge cases where designers with fewer skills or years of experience charge higher than designers who are even more experienced. This can be a result of their confidence in themselves and not necessarily their craft. There are also design and business skills. Most designers focus a lot on their craft and design skills, neglecting their business skills which can put a bottleneck on their earning potential. It’s advisable to put efforts into growing your business skills (which includes: presenting and selling your work better, having high-quality work on your portfolio, sharing high-quality work on online platforms, and learning how to negotiate better). This makes you a well-rounded and well-skilled designer across the board and influences your earning potential for the better.
Your goals as a designer
The goals you set for your design career also influence how hard you push yourself and how confident you are to charge clients higher rates. Some designers dream of purchasing Teslas, Porsche, etc, and are motivated to grow their skills and confidently charge clients more money to help them achieve their dreams. Other designers don’t have such mindsets and are comfortable charging just enough money to meet their immediate needs. In the long run, the income gap between these two sets of designers tends to grow exponentially. It’s advisable to have meaningful goals for your career and work hard to have the skills to back up your earning potential.
Where you live in the world
As a Nigerian, this has directly or indirectly impacted my earning potential over the years as working with local clients can be financially underwhelming. Most Nigerian clients can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars for their projects, they usually have a low budget. That is quite understandable as in Nigeria, there designers are available to work for even lower budgets. However, as a Nigerian or African designer or a designer from a third-world country, it’s possible to break into the global market and get international gigs with foreign clients. This can upscale your earning potential. This might not be an easy undertaking, but it’s worth taking a shot at.
Quality of clients
The quality of clients you work with has a huge impact on the rates you can charge for your work. The industry your clients operate in, clients in cryptocurrency, fintech, and logistics industries can pay high rates. The growth stage a company is in directly impacts how high you can charge your clients. Clients who have raised seed-stage, series A, B, C, or D funding rounds are more likely to accept your rate of $10,000 than other clients who haven’t raised a single round of funding. There are high-paying clients, low-paying clients, and clients who want you to do their work for free. It all depends on how positioned you are as a designer. It takes a lot of commitment to refuse to take gigs from low-paying clients regardless of how badly you need the money and raise your rates to work only with the higher-paying clients. It can take some time to make this switch, but it’s worth it in the long run for your freelance career.
Pricing Strategies:
There are a couple of pricing strategies and I’d highlight a couple here.
Hourly-based pricing:
Hourly rate pricing is probably the simplest and most widespread strategy. This can be $10, $20, $50, or $100 per hour which can be great for an early-career designer. This works well when you want clients to pay you based on the number of hours you spend working on their project. Most freelance job sites like Upwork, Fiverr, Contra, etc also operate based on an hourly-based pricing model. However, this strategy is not effective if you’re looking to scale your earning potential. It also puts a ceiling on your earning potential if you’re highly skilled and a very efficient designer. For example, designing a landing page can take 30 minutes to an hour for some designers. How do you justify receiving $50 for that work when the same work can go for $3,000 — $10,000 for other clients? Say in the web3 or cryptocurrency industry.
Project-based Pricing
This is a great pricing strategy that involves charging clients based on the project. It could be for a marketing website, a landing page, or a mobile/web app. This can be charging $10,000 for a landing page design or $5,000 for a mobile app design.
Value-based pricing
This is arguably the best pricing strategy and has been made popular by Chris DO of the Futur. You can watch some of his videos on YouTube on how he mastered this pricing strategy. This is charging clients based on the value your work provides for the clients. Say you design an e-commerce site for Louis Vuitton and they make $100 million, you can tell them to pay you $10% which adds up to a million dollars.
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Thank you for reading.
