What I learned from personal experience over the years of freelancing

Originally posted in / r / freelance on Reddit, but I post it here for posterity.

I am engaged in freelancing for quite a long time and I can share bits and pieces of knowledge that I heard or learned myself, often through hard times.

A typical staff member costs the company 2-3 times more than his nominal wage.

Use this as a basis for calculating your rates. $ 90 per hour may seem like an expensive alternative to an employee who receives a salary of $ 30 per hour, but in reality it is the equivalent of $ 90, and costs stop immediately after the project ends.
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If a client requests 6+ hours a day, you will spend 8 hours

You will not do anything useful (read: paid) in the remaining two hours. They robbed you all day, but only paid 75%. In such situations, charge a daily rate.

Leave time for idle
Burnout is real, and it sucks. If you burn, you will lose weeks (even months) of work, so it is better to plan your free time. Try to include "annual leave" in the rates.

You are a business, not an employee

Some negotiations are in the order of things, but ultimately you are involved in a business transaction, so the client cannot dictate working hours, bids, etc. He may offer or ask about them, but ultimately it is you who decide when and under what conditions to work. That leads to…

Unreasonable requests deserve unreasonable rates

For me, “urgent”, “immediate”, “urgent” work immediately adds 30% to the tariff with a minimum payment of two hours. If I have to quit the current project in order to “urgently” add a line of code to your website, then you pay me at least two hours of performance loss and delay of another project. I believe that if this is really an emergency, the client will gladly pay, and if not, he will prefer to schedule the task like everyone else.

Set working hours and stick to them.

I work quite irregularly during the day and in the evening, but for clients my working time is from 9 to 17, from Tuesday to Friday. Any requests after hours means an increase in rates of 30%. Please note that this adds up to the urgency tariff (an emergency solution at midnight will cost at least two hours with a 160% tariff, even if it takes me 15 minutes). If I decide to work outside business hours, I will charge a standard rate, but explicit requests for such work lead to an increase in the tariff.

Be open, honest and sincere

The worst thing for a client is to hear about problems the day before (or after) delivery. If you have any problems, talk to him in advance and agree on the expectations. Maybe the feature you are stuck on is not really important to delay the project, and maybe the delay is just a problem with communication. In any case, it is always better to talk to the client sooner rather than later. Often they understand and approve a small adjustment of the work plan.

Hunger does not mean despair

Do not bother to race for contracts that look problematic. You will only spend valuable time on pain and frustration. It doesn’t matter that you’ve run out of money (and they don’t have to run out if you charge the right rates, but still). Lack of a client is better than a bad client, because a bad client is more expensive than just doing nothing.

If you can't handle it, let the other one do it.

If you are not able to satisfy the client's request, then you can support the freelancers community - and help the client find the person who can handle it. Better yet, hire a subcontractor yourself. Again, be sure to meet customer expectations. To undertake a job in which you lack the qualifications is a useless thing, but an open discussion of this with a client engenders respect and benevolence.

Your project is infinitely more important for you than for the client.

To truly understand this, you need to dive a little into the topic, but ultimately every business owner is primarily focused on managing their business at the moment . For you, the business is this project, so you are focused on it. The client’s business is selling widgets or booking llamas, or learning squid sign language. Whatever his business, your project definitely does not apply to him. That is why customers sometimes seem disinterested or respond only after two weeks to what you think requires urgent attention. The client is busy with his business, and you are just a risky item of expenditure. The only thing when the project will start to worry the client more than you is when the client loses money because of problems with the project.

Although some of these things seem fairly obvious, a surprisingly long time is needed to understand them in my own experience.