Looking back at my first logo job for a coffee shop in Boise

I charged $50 flat and spent over 20 hours on it. I see new people now doing the same thing, taking any price just to get work. It matters because you burn out fast and clients think good work is cheap. How do you even start to figure out a fair hourly rate for that first project?

4 comments

4 Comments

evan_grant701mo ago

Read a good tip: triple your day job's hourly rate.

drews551mo ago

Yeah but that only works if your day job pays okay to start with. My buddy's a barista, tripling that rate gets you to like 45 bucks an hour. Good luck finding freelance work at that price with no special skills. The math falls apart for a lot of service jobs. You gotta know what people will actually pay for what you do.

fiona7491mo ago

Tried that math once and it made me laugh. My freelance rate would be insane and no client would ever pay it. The real trick is figuring out what the market will actually bear for your skills, not just doing simple multiplication. Sometimes that's double, sometimes it's way more if you have a speciality.

victorhernandez16d ago

Man, my friend Jen tried this trick back when she went solo doing graphic design. Her day job paid like $30 an hour, so she thought, "Cool, I'll charge $90." She got crickets for two months. Finally she just started asking local shops what they paid their regular designers. Found out the going rate for the small biz logos and flyers she was good at was more like $55-60 an hour. She had to eat her pride and drop the price a bit, but at least she got clients. The triple thing sounds good on paper, but it doesn't account for what people in your town or niche actually spend.