---
title: "Pricing a redesign without guessing"
description: "Hourly billing punishes the studio that got faster, and a single quote invites a single objection. Here is how we scope a redesign into three fixed prices, what we put in writing about revisions, and the two clauses that have saved more projects than any estimate spreadsheet."
pubDate: 2026-08-04
author: en/mara-lindqvist
topic: en/studio
tags: ["freelance", "pricing", "contracts"]
cover: ../../../assets/covers/reef-prix-refonte.webp
coverAlt: "A cliff at sea seen from the air, green slopes falling into turquoise water"
featured: false
draft: true
---

There is a trap in hourly billing that took me four years to see. The better you get, the less you earn for the same work. You learn the stack, you build the tooling, you stop making the mistake you made in 2019, and the reward is an invoice that goes down. Meanwhile the client, who does not care how long the site took, is paying for your inexperience at exactly the moment you stopped having any.

Hours are a unit of cost. Clients buy outcomes. Any pricing model that measures the first and sells it as the second will eventually feel unfair to somebody, usually both parties on the same project.

## Three prices, one project

We stopped sending one number in 2022. Every proposal now contains three, and they are not three sizes of the same thing: they are three different projects that solve the same problem with different amounts of ambition.

| | Refit | Rebuild | Platform |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| What it is | Existing structure, new front end | New structure, new content model, new front end | Rebuild plus editorial tooling and a design system |
| Pages designed | Up to 6 templates | Up to 12 templates | Templates plus a component library |
| Content | Migrated as is | Restructured with the client | Restructured, plus a workflow for the team |
| Typical duration | 4 to 6 weeks | 8 to 12 weeks | 14 weeks and up |
| Band | 6k to 9k | 12k to 18k | 25k and up |

Three effects follow, and I did not predict any of them correctly.

The first is that the conversation changes from "yes or no" to "which one", which is a far better conversation to be in. The second is that clients pick the middle option most of the time, which is well documented and slightly embarrassing to rely on, so we make sure the middle option is genuinely the one we would recommend. The third is the useful one: clients who choose the cheapest option do so knowing what they are not getting, and they stop asking for it in week seven, because it is written down as belonging to a different price.

> A single quote invites a single objection: the number. Three quotes invite a decision, and a decision is a conversation you can actually help with.

## What we put in writing about revisions

Unlimited revisions is not generosity, it is an unpriced option that the client did not ask for and cannot value. What we write instead is short:

1. **Two rounds of consolidated feedback per deliverable.** Consolidated means one document from the named decider, not five emails from four people.
2. **A round is a set of changes within the agreed direction.** Changing the direction is not a round, it is a new deliverable, and we will say so on the call rather than in the invoice.
3. **Additional rounds are quoted before they happen**, at a stated day rate, and they never happen by surprise.
4. **Silence past ten working days closes the round.** Not as a punishment: because a project that pauses for a month costs us the slot we held for it.

The fourth line is the one that has done the most work. Projects do not usually die from disagreement, they die from drift, and drift is expensive in a way nobody puts on an invoice.[^rate]

[^rate]: The arithmetic that convinced me: a fixed price of 9,000 delivered in 70 hours is an effective rate of about 128 an hour. The same project, quoted hourly at 90, is worth 6,300 and takes the same skill. Fixed pricing pays you for knowing how, which is the only thing a client is actually buying.

---

## The two clauses that saved the most projects

**The content deadline clause.** Copy and images are due on a date, that date is in the schedule with a named owner, and a missed content date moves the launch date by the same number of days. It sounds harsh written down and it has never once caused friction, because it is agreed at week zero when everyone is optimistic and reasonable. Without it, the studio absorbs the delay invisibly, holds the team, and then gets asked why the site launched late.

**The pause clause.** If a project stops for more than three weeks for reasons on the client's side, restarting costs a stated fee, and the schedule is renegotiated rather than resumed. This is not a penalty, it is an honest description of what happens: we sold that time to someone else, the context has to be rebuilt, and the person who knew the codebase best is now half way into another project. Naming the cost in advance turns an awkward apology into a line item.

Neither clause has ever been invoked in anger. Both have changed behaviour, which is what a good clause does: it is not there to be used, it is there to be read.

## When hourly is still the right answer

Fixed pricing needs a fixed thing to price. There are three cases where we still bill time, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest: ongoing maintenance, where the work is genuinely unpredictable and the relationship is long; discovery, where the deliverable is the definition of the project itself and cannot be scoped before it exists; and emergency work, where the client wants someone available rather than someone efficient. In each of those the client is buying availability or exploration, not an outcome, and hours are the right unit for both. The mistake is not hourly billing. The mistake is hourly billing a project whose shape you already know, because you are then charging for the least valuable thing you bring, which is your time, instead of the most valuable, which is that you have done this eleven times before and know which four decisions will matter.

## What to do on Monday

If you want to change one thing, change the number of numbers. Take the next proposal you were going to send with a single price, and split it into a smaller version you would be happy to deliver and a larger one you would be proud of. Write two sentences under each explaining who it is right for. Send all three.

The worst outcome is that the client picks the small one, and you have a project at a price you set, with a scope you wrote, that ends on a date you chose. That is not a bad Monday.
