After Hours© 004

Welcome back to another edition of After Hours©, where we help you find a solution to a common self-employed-creative problem

Last week we spoke about protecting your income and getting paid.

Today, we are covering one of the most painful parts of freelancing.

Todays topic: Pricing your services
Estimated read time: 5 minutes (Skim time: 90 seconds)

What kind of problem is this?

Pricing is a clarity + confidence problem.

It’s common among self-employed creatives because there’s no single right answer.

• You can Google, LLM search, or Reddit-read all day and still find no definitive answer to:
• How much should I charge for my services?

That’s the clarity problem.

But pricing is also a confidence problem, because maybe you don’t back yourself and your skills.

What happens when you don’t know how to price?

• Your offers don’t make sense (to you or clients)
• Your income stays inconsistent
• Clients are harder to land
• You undercharge or overexplain
• You feel awkward talking about money
• You say yes to the wrong clients

Read on for a real life example or skip ahead to the solution section.

It’s a freelancer canon event

You’re not alone.

Fresh out of agencies and starting to land clients for Boring Studios, Eden and I used to price differently for every single client.

We’d Google “how much to charge” for website copy, web design, graphic design, and branding.

Then we’d ask their budget.
Then we’d give them a quote.

No packages. No offer. No pricing system.

It was inconsistent, hard to sell, and a complete waste of mental energy.

After months of that, we worked backwards:

• How much we needed to run the business
• What our skills were actually worth
• What services we enjoyed and wanted to sell

Then we made standardised packages and stuck to them.

No guessing. No negotiating. Everything on paper.

High-paying clients took us more seriously, onboarding got easier, and the mental load dropped massively.

Fix your confidence

You’re probably a creative of some kind: writer, designer, photographer, developer, artist.

People will tell you it’s not valuable. But your skillset is so sought after that people without it are building machines to mimic it.

In the age of AI, human-made creative stands out even more.

If you don’t believe in what you’re selling, how do you expect people to buy it?

Define your offer and services

You don’t need to offer everything. Choose one or two services and do them well.

Original Boring Studios:
SEO, website design, website copy, dev, copywriting, social media, marketing strategy, branding strategy, UGC, graphic design, illustration, signage. We offered everything.

Defined Boring Studios:
Branding packages: Strategy, Visuals, Voice.

Refine what you sell into what you actually want to do, and what you’re actually good at.

Now, let’s price it.

The solution is the Pricing Calculator 2.0

You’re the first person to see our Pricing Calculator 2.0.

We made the original Pricing Calculator in 2024, and it’s been downloaded by 25,000+ creatives. We tweaked it, and now 2.0 is even better.

The original was free, and 2.0 is still free.

Why? Because this is one of the hardest parts of freelancing, and creatives deserve to be paid fairly.

With the calculator, you can:

• Work out your business and personal expenses
• Price based on your skill level
• Discover your hourly rate
• Turn that rate into packages and clear offers
• Work out when you can take holidays

Use it here:
Pricing Calculator 2.0 link

This week you will

Step one: Define your offer
Refine what you sell into what you love to do, and what your greatest skill is.

Step two: Create packages
Use the calculator to build clear packages for your services.

Step three: Put your packages somewhere visible
Put them in your Services Guide, on your website, or into a rate card.

Here’s our Services Guide template (if you want the shortcut):
Services Guide template link

Step four: Make it easy to buy
Put your Services Guide (or chosen link) in your social media bio and anywhere else you show up online.

Congratulations. You’ve confirmed your pricing and your offer.

Next time a client asks, you’ve got it.
It’s clear, confirmed, and documented.

No negotiating your worth. No pricing panic.

Pricing done.

Now go enjoy some holiday cheer, whatever that means to you.

Until next week,

Penelope
Co-Founder of Boring Studios, Writer, Pricing Specialist