cloudartisans

7 years agodiscuss

I've never actually asked or gotten questions about my invoices. So, either everything is crystal clear, or you're right, they don't look at them. I suspect every client probably looks at the first couple to get to know me and establish trust, and then just skims them thereafter. But it's nice for both of us--we can each review and see exactly what I did and how long it took.

cloudartisans

7 years agodiscuss

You're right, I don't know. I figure, if they are happy, I will get repeat business and referrals. If I'm charging too little, then they should be extremely happy and are even better champions of my work/name. That seems worth more than higher pay, long-term.

cloudartisans

7 years agodiscuss

Alternate view that's worked well for me: not only do I not charge by the day, I don't even charge by the hour. I charge by the minute and tell them exactly what I did in the time I worked. Even when something takes me a paltry couple of minutes because I may have recently spent an hour on it for another client and I could easily charge more money for it. This level of transparency earns me an incredible amount of trust with my clients, who, so far, have each become "client for life." And the overhead isn't bad--a simple spreadsheet--complete a task, describe it in several words, enter the number of minutes spent, and everything gets summed up to the total amount due at the bottom.

EDIT: for clarity, I build RESTful API back-ends on AWS and support them with DevOps; I can see how my method may not work for other industries.

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