When I first started, I had no idea how to charge for my work. Then my friend Jake told me something I never forgot.
“No one is paying you for the time it takes you to do the work. They’re paying you for the thousands of hours you spent becoming an expert.”
My friend Jake
When you drop hourly pricing, you take control of your efficiency, your money and your time.
If you’re struggling with how to price your services so you make more money online, I’ve got you. The truth is, hourly pricing sucks. Once you break that mindset, you open the door to higher-paying clients.
When project pricing makes sense
Project pricing isn’t the answer every single time, but it is about 95% of the time. You can justify it based on:
- Your industry
- Your skill level
- The results you can deliver
- The clients you target
I once worked on a project with a friend who’d hired a freelancer on Upwork to do some basic custom CSS. The guy coded a button into the menu, adjusted some measurements and added a background to the sidebar. He billed (I believe) three to five hours. For what my friend got, it wasn’t a bad price, especially with a cheap hourly rate.
That same day, I finished 26 time-consuming tasks on the same project, everything from email setup to design to building the funnel.
Did the freelancer rip my friend off? Absolutely not.
Did I? No way.
I’m not sharing this to brag (unless website nerd talk impresses you). I’m sharing it to show two different ways of charging, based on skill.
Project pricing only works if you target the right clients and you’re the most valuable option. You become the most valuable option by learning as much as you can and becoming an expert in your field.
The first website I ever built took me three months. A few years later, I could build a better one in a fraction of the time. Take a wild guess which one looked better and cost more. The first was barely worth the price of the theme. The newer one was worth every penny my client paid, especially with the revenue it brought in for them.
Do what works for you
In the end, it’s up to you. I’m not here to tell you what to do or draw a line in the sand. It’s taken me years of testing to figure out what works for me. If you like charging hourly to protect your time, so be it.
But as you get more efficient, more skilled and more valuable, you stop attracting the clients who nickel-and-dime you. Take it from the guy who started his recording career mixing for clients who might as well have held a stopwatch, trying to squeeze every last minute out of a project. (Go away, $10-an-hour SoundCloud rappers.)
When I switched to project pricing, a lot of stress left my life. I got paid fairly for my skills instead of my time, and that matters for your sanity and your business.
Still track your time
Not charging by the hour doesn’t mean you stop tracking your time. The tracking is for you, not the client. Use it to:
- Compete with yourself without ever sacrificing quality
- Find the strengths and weaknesses in how you work
- Spot the slow parts of your process, and look into outsourcing them
The fact that you’re reading this tells me you care about being an expert and marketing yourself the right way. You’re so much more than a time card. Leave hourly pricing to the jobs that don’t need highly skilled people, and do everything you can to give your clients more value than they expect. You’ll always hear me say the same thing:
“There are two ways to do things. The right way, and the better way that hasn’t been discovered yet. I’m always trying to find the better way.”
Me, wishing I was Yoda
Read books, take courses, learn from mentors, do unpaid work to get experience, build relationships, connect people and give tremendous value. I was a broke musician stuck in a shitty retail job, without a clue about marketing or recording. Everybody starts somewhere.
Now go get some new clients. You’ve got this.
I first wrote this in 2019 and updated it in 2026. The advice hasn’t changed.