Vent: Took a flat fee for a rush job and ended up working for $4 an hour

My buddy Mark who does web dev told me flat rates are always better because clients hate watching the clock. So I took a graphic design gig for $200 flat, thinking it would be like 5 hours tops. Dude kept adding changes and I'm too nice to say no, ended up spending 50 hours over two weeks on it. That's like $4 an hour before taxes, and I could have made way more just dog walking. Mark never mentioned scope creep in his big speech about flat fees, weirdly enough. Has anyone else had a friend's pricing advice totally backfire like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

gray31411d ago

Flat rate jobs are a gamble for sure. Sounds like Mark forgot to mention that "scope creep" is just "we pay you the same no matter what" in disguise. Next time you might want to set a hard cap on changes upfront.

casey34211d ago

Fifty changes and still the same price?

paulnguyen11d ago

Actually, setting a hard cap on changes can backfire if you're not careful with the wording. Some clients will see a cap and then load up every change they can think of right before you hit it, making the final revisions even messier. I've found it works better to charge a flat rate for the first round of changes and then switch to hourly for anything beyond that. That way you're not arguing over what counts as a "change" and what doesn't. Mark's mistake was probably being too vague about what the flat rate actually covered in the first place.