Web Design Pricing: The Drawbacks to Charging by The Hour

Pricing a web design project is an art that has to be mastered by a web agency. The company needs to figure out how best to charge clients a fair price for work completed, and how to beat the prices offered by its competitors so that getting projects won’t be a struggle.

In the world of web design, a web agency often charges its clients per hour. Some designers have a flat hourly rate regardless of the type of work they do, while others have different hourly rates for different tasks (designing, coding, testing, etc.). Giving the client a breakdown of proposed times for a project is a transparent way of educating them in how long every task will take. It also sets a precedent from the beginning of the project, that any work will be looked at purely from a time point of view.

This approach, however, can have its drawbacks, such as:

• No matter how detailed your planning is, it’s almost impossible to be 100% accurate with your timing estimates. What if you encounter unexpected bugs? What if you have hardware or Internet problems in the middle of the project? Your clients won’t be too happy if the project takes longer than initially estimated, and therefore costs more than the original quote, so it’s important to make it very clear to them that your proposals are estimates, and that if additional work and time is required, you’ll charge them more.
• Many clients can have a pre-determined idea of how much web design is worth, so telling them your hourly charge (as opposed to a full project cost) can give them the perfect excuse to walk away. If your hourly rate is higher than your closest competitor, this may count against you, even if the overall project cost is identical. Sometimes even putting your rates up publicly on your website will cause some potential clients to walk away without ever contacting you because they think your hourly rate is out of their budget.

• A lot of clients don’t understand why designers charge as much as they do. There are many design firms with lower cost (and generally lower quality) that charge next to nothing and put out inferior work. Clients often sign on with these designers thinking they’ll save money, until they realize that those $10/hour web designers take five times longer to do everything than the designers charging $40/hour. Unfortunately, there are clients out there who don’t realize that uploading a few photos on a website shouldn’t take hours.

• This method can work fine if you focus on a single project for an extended period of time. But if you always work on multiple projects at once, billing by the hour can be almost impossible.

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