I know I have taken a year or so hiatus from the blog, so let me play a paragraph or two of catch-up for everyone who may be wondering, “What the heck are you doing to put food on the table and gas in your car these days, anyway??” Since moving back to San Diego, Butterfinger and I have committed ourselves to cohesively using our respective web talents in order to nourish our bodies, have shelter, transportation and occasionally go see a movie. For him this means creating websites, writing web applications, maintaining servers, hosting websites and an array other other miscellaneous IT tasks that would frankly be quite boring and tedious to outline. For myself this means web content copywriting, SEO (search engine optimization, aka – making sure that your website shows up in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), social networking, internet branding/establishing a web presence and again, another array of web tasks not really relevant unless you want us to build you a website (in which case email me).
I want to help people. I want to work my tail off right now and embrace my re-addiction to coffee to get some of Butterfinger’s amazing ideas out there so I CAN spend my days helping people without having worry about how I am going to pay my car insurance. I wish we still lived in a time where you could trade me a couple of chickens for a couple hours of SEO and content writing, but unfortunately (and not just because I choose not to eat chicken) the barter system is not really a viable option for obtaining most of life’s necessities.
It comes down to assigning worth, value; which is a hard thing to do when you’re used to people telling you how much you’re worth to them. Do I think what I do is valuable? Of course I do. But I also think its value is dependent upon the skills, talents, motivation and financial situation of the person needing the work done. So I ask you, my fellow web entrepreneurs/worker bees/students/unicorns – Is it wrong to have a “sliding scale” of pricing dependent on the client? What could be the possible benefits and pitfalls of this type of system? Very few things in life are black and whiate, so why should I affix a set cost to what I do? Why not instead allow the project to dictate its own value, and accordingly, the cost.
Thoughts and criticism welcome.
Giving some thought to the question, I would offer the following. I don’t think it’s wrong to offer a “sliding scale” of pricing, however, it should depend on the system that you are using. The company I work for certainly offers a “sliding scale” although we don’t call it that. We price our services based on several factors, such as, what is the long term value of the client, what particular services they are requesting, how easy/hard of a client they are to deal with (i.e. do they pay promptly, are they clear about what they want or change their minds throughout the process), etc. With that being said, you also want to give yourself several bottom line price levels for what your time is worth either per hour or per project. As you are thinking about how to price a project you should think about this and other questions, “Is the particular assignment fairly routine, or does it demand a certain level of expertise that fewer people possess?” Don’t sell yourself short just because of someone’s “perceived” inability to pay. I guess all that being said, you need to evaluate each particular project based on those factors (and others that you value) and price each project. I wouldn’t make the prices wildly different per job, but certainly adjustable. Hope that helps or at least gives you another opinion.