How a website project is priced

There are a number of factors that you have to bear in mind when pricing a website for a customer and for most projects, regardless of the size and complexity, the same rules usually apply.

Project cost or hourly rate

As a website agency you want to be paid for your time so working on an hourly rate you ensure that you get paid exactly for the work you do. If you’re going into a company to work for a few days as a freelancer then an hourly rate is definitely the better approach.  You come in, you work a set time and you go.

However if you are working on a larger project for a few weeks or months, then there could easily be a lot of creep in the project.  Also does your time for small team meetings, time at the water cooler, coffee breaks etc, form part of this hourly rate?  If you are working at your own premises away from the eye of your customer, then there has to be a lot of trust.  Also you may go well over the client’s budget.

With most website projects the customer will always prefer a project cost.  A set fee is provided for a set amount of work and in this way the customer knows what they are getting and can manage their budget.  This is the approach that we use for all of our website projects.

Costing the project

At Way Fresh the first thing that we do is breakdown the project into hours and hey presto we use our hourly rate to get the rough figure.  But with longer projects you also have to add on a bit for meetings, travel, writing the specification, final testing, sorting domains and emails and then sometimes a little contingency for anything unforeseen that might crop up.

In some cases we may have already developed code that can be used on part of the project, such as a blog, so although less work is needed than writing it from scratch, we will still add a competitive fee which helps to cover some of our time that we spent in writing it in the first place.

We may also adjust the price based on how quick the client wants it.  If we take on this project are we going to have to be burning the midnight oil and lots of weekends.  If so, then a bit extra may be added on to compensate ourselves for this.

Lastly, how much do we want this project? If it’s a project we’d love to have in the portfolio then we may take a hit and discount the project price to make it too enticing for the customer.

Conclusion

As you can see there are lots of factors we take into consideration when pricing a project, but the price per project method is always best for all parties so everyone knows what they are receiving and providing for the price.