Early in the process, even before beginning to work you need to find out what they really want and WHY. What goals do they want to reach? From that you can make an educated guess how much value it will generate aka how much it is worth to them.

Pick a yearly salary / 260  = Your Day Rate

260 = Total days worked in a year, usually 260.

Estimate a Low–High amount of time it would take you to do the project and tell your client the range. Lower amount = easy client. Higher amount = difficult client.

How do you all calculate your freelance rate? I've taken freelance work from an acquaintance to build a 4-page website, and I should suggest the range as he's also not familiar with design/website/...

Oftentimes the first answer you’ll hear in response to WHY is “because others are doing the same”. I recommend to dig deeper to surface what hopes they have with the website. Who knows, maybe those learnings will lead to more work opportunities for you :) Good luck! 🍀

Some people would even add a bit extra (+ 50%–200%) to their day rate since you are working freelance and not receiving the benefits of a salaried job. 

Alternative would be, to give a Project Rate in which case it could be a flat rate - based on how much time/effort required.

Wow thanks @lusbuab for a great advice! For this client, he's just starting a business for the first time, and he's making a website because other businesses have one, without good understanding of 'WHY'.

I always find a day rate the easiest. Generally you can ball park how many days something takes and it’s easy for the client to understand time=money. Also highly recommend half upfront, half at the end. Keeps everyone invested in getting it done.

From my experience this leads to smoother process and happier clients – often times less work than expected (to reach the goal we need X, but not Y) and really reaching their goals for a known-upfront budget instead of an open-ended amount of hours at an hourly rate.

Base your fee on that. One nice side effect is that you will know why the client is doing it and what goals they have. You are in a position to know whether you can help deliver those goals (or not, in which case you should be transparent about the fact).

Coming from a different angle than the “time equals money” approach others might suggest.

Find out how much VALUE you provide by doing your work for this particular client. Base your fee on that instead of some made up hourly/daily rate. Let me explain:

Thanks @altair! This sounds like a good starting point as my client is not familiar with how the cost works.

For the cost, I'll do day-rate for ease of communication, but I definitely think the exercises of building a better understanding about the goal, why and what a good result would look like are essential.

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