Why is pricing design so hard?

The creative process is full of unknowns.

Photo by novia wu

For freelance designers — or any creative service business owners — one of the most challenging aspects of business is pricing. We have uncertainty about what price our skills and experience should command. It’s difficult to compare how our prices stack up to others in the industry (because nobody likes talking about their prices). And even if we have all that sorted out, there’s no consensus on what pricing method is easiest to apply and fairest to use.

No matter what pricing method you employ or how much you charge, you need an ability to accurately estimate prices. For most of us, that involves estimating the time a project will take and then multiplying by your rate. Even if you don’t share those calculations with your clients, internally that’s what the process entails.

But this process is flawed. Not because we’re doing anything wrong. Simply because we’re trying to price an unknown quantity.

Creative processes are full of unknowns

Even when you have the tightest, most-detailed project brief and well-researched scope, there are parts of the design process which are out of your control.

Design timeframes are dependent on the speed and quality of client feedback, for example. You can do your best to pre-judge your client’s communication skills and aptitude for useful feedback, but until you go through the process you never know for sure how efficiently it’s going to play out.

During your design discovery, you may realize the initial business goals or user needs were flawed, and instead of spending most of your time exploring design solutions you have to spend it reframing project goals. The success of design, after all, relies on asking the right questions before you can define the answers.

Design is problem-solving. We have methods and repeatable processes that help us arrive at good design solutions, consistently. (This is one thing that separates designers from artists).

But like any problem-solvers, we don’t know for sure if we’ll arrive at the best solution right away, or take many rounds of exploration to find and test it. The more experience we have, the better…