Hit $5k in a single week of Shopify work for the first time, 4 years in

I've been freelancing since 2021, mostly small product page fixes and theme tweaks. Last week in Austin I landed two bigger projects back to back. One was a full rebuild for a candle brand, the other was fixing a checkout flow that had a 30% cart abandonment problem. I charged more than I normally do because I finally started quoting by the outcome instead of by the hour. The candle client paid $3,200 and the checkout one paid $1,800. It felt weird typing those numbers into the invoice. My usual week is like $800. Did anyone else hit a point where the pricing just clicked? What changed for you, the skills or just the confidence to ask?

2 comments

2 Comments

finleym3716d ago

Quoting by outcome is the real unlock, but nobody talks about how it changes the client's mindset too. Once you stop billing for time, the client stops thinking of you as a worker and starts treating you like a partner. That checkout project probably felt easy to you because you'd seen that problem a hundred times, but to them you were the expert who knew exactly what to fix. The skills were always there, the hard part was convincing yourself their problem had a price tag. $5k in a week sounds crazy until you realize that cart fix probably saved them way more than $1,800 in a month.

ross.kim16d ago

That $3,200 candle rebuild is the one making me raise an eyebrow. A full rebuild for a candle brand sounds like a lot of moving parts, and if you underquoted it, you might've just bought yourself a rough week of scope creep. I've seen guys in the trades do the same thing, land one big number and think they've cracked the code, then find out the client wanted three rounds of revisions they didn't mention upfront. The checkout fix for $1,800 sounds fair, but I'd honestly want to see the math on what the cart fix actually saved them before calling it a win. Hard to tell if the pricing clicked or if you just got lucky with two clients who didn't push back.