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Just realized my rate sheet from 2019 had half the prices I charge now
Found my old rate doc buried in Google Drive from when I first went solo in 2019, and I was charging $35 an hour for design work back then. A guy at a coffee shop in Cincinnati last month mentioned he quotes $95 minimum now, and I laughed because I thought that was wild until I did the math on my own old sheet. Rent went up, software went up, and I was still scared to bump my numbers because one client in 2021 pushed back on a $50 increase. So for anyone who has been holding the same rate for years, when did you finally pull the trigger and raise it, and did you warn old clients first or just quote new ones higher?
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wells.evan3h ago
I used to tell myself grandfathered clients were sacred, like charging them more would burn the bridge. Then I added up my own hours and realized I was basically paying to work for a couple of them. What killed the old way of thinking for me was losing a whole weekend to a project that paid less than a single day at my new rate should cost. It hit me that loyalty to a low number was just fear wearing a nice hat. Doing the math out loud, software, taxes, health stuff, showed the old me was losing money on every invoice. New folks get the new number, old ones get told once with a date, and the ones who leave were never really paying me right to begin with.
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