I feel your approach is better than mine. It is true, the client can easily think “If he can just offer me that straight away, he must be charging me a lot”. I suppose another form of the discount is to offer extra services which are not too hard for yourself.

Some nice points there, thank you, I am sure everyone can learn from them.

re No. 3: “Personally I believe that if you can offer even a 10% discount, it plays excellently with the client’s psychology and they may feel indebted to you just for such a simple gesture.”

Just a suggestion from a business point of view I would never ever discount on a quote; we take great care to be as lean as possible and don’t want to give our clients the impression that we inflate our prices so much we can easily knock off 5- 10 % here or there:-) Another way to handle this difficult question is to add value to the project; for example add another page or graphic design or some free SEO or whatever would be useful and valuable to client, but is not too time consuming for you.

We also structure our proposals in such a way that if someone doesn’t want to pay the full price we can take out items (eg the CMS or the copywriting or photography or some feature of the website like a forum…) Hope this helps!

Q: I have more projects(work) coming; can I get the first one for at lower price or free?
A: I charge $XXX.XX an hour for that service(Don’t work for free).

Of course I think this is too high, he may be the best, but he is a blood sucking unfair piece of shit. Freelancers should make their time look valuable, similar to the way this solicitor does, but never charge stupid things like that. A phone call/email/IM conversation should never be charged. The point I’m trying to make, while ranting about my solicitor is, I agree – give yourself some value, within the means of normality (as it is measured by people on Earth and not planet Law Society)

You took time to earn your knowledge, just like a doctor took time to gain his so why should the doctor or *insert random field person* get paid and you have to do samples for some client? Knowledge and experience equals money, if a client doesn’t know that they’re probably better of not being your client.

I find the best way to be is just be real. Everyone has lives, no one has 100 years to work on a website. If they keep asking for changes, you might want to tell them that more time = more money. Or perhaps charge a on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, this way you continually get income as opposed to a static price for a website. For a big project, it’s probably ideal to charge by time but maybe not by hour. This would remind the client that your time is valuable and that they can’t waste it with petty tacky features. Of course every situation is different so evaluate your options.

I definitely agree with and “love” these above statements. Working for free definitely isn’t cool and I also do a 50 to 50 ratio. You’re quite unlikely to get burned by someone if they’re willing to put money in your hand from day one. It also shows they trust your character and understand that this is a service, not a spec contest.