I Don’t Know What to Charge (Here’s Why That’s Not Actually Your Problem)
Every business owner hits this wall eventually. You’re sitting there, staring at a blank email, trying to figure out what number to type. The potential client has asked for a quote and you’ve got absolutely no idea what to tell them.
So you do what everyone does. You Google “average rates for [your industry]” and get a thousand different answers. Some people charge £30 an hour. Others charge £300. The range is so wide it’s basically useless. You look at what your competitors are charging but half of them don’t even list prices on their websites. The ones that do seem to be all over the place. One person’s charging £500 for something similar to what you do. Another’s charging £2,000 for what looks like the exact same service. How are you supposed to make sense of that?
You think about what you need to earn. You do some rough maths. Bills, rent, food, the occasional night out that doesn’t involve eating beans on toast. You work out you need to make about £3,000 a month to survive comfortably. Maybe £4,000 if you want to actually save something. You calculate backwards, factor in how many hours you can realistically bill in a month, and you land on a number. Let’s say £75 an hour. That feels about right mathematically.
But then you think about actually saying that number out loud to a real human being and something happens. Your stomach drops a bit. You start second-guessing. Is £75 too much? Will they laugh? Will they think you’re taking the piss? You remember that competitor you saw charging £40 and suddenly £75 feels wildly unreasonable. Maybe you should say £50. That’s safer. More reasonable. Less likely to scare them off.
So you type £50. Hit send. Feel relieved that you didn’t have to have an awkward conversation about money. The client says yes immediately, no negotiation, and you get this sinking feeling that you’ve just undercharged yourself again. Because if they said yes that quickly, they probably would have paid more. But it’s too late now. The number’s out there.
What’s Actually Happening Here
The “I don’t know what to charge” problem isn’t really about not knowing. You’ve done the research. You’ve seen the range. You’ve done the maths on what you need to earn. The information exists. You could, if you really wanted to, pick a number right now based on industry standards and your own financial needs.
The real problem is that you don’t trust yourself to charge what you’re actually worth. You’ve got all this noise in your head telling you that whatever number you pick is probably wrong. Too high and you’ll scare clients away. Too low and you’ll be broke. There’s apparently some perfect sweet spot that everyone else has figured out except you.
But here’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re agonising over pricing: there is no perfect number. There’s no magical formula that spits out exactly what you should charge. Every single person who’s confidently charging £100 or £200 an hour went through the same uncertainty you’re going through now. They just decided on a number and stuck with it long enough to get comfortable saying it out loud.
The difference between you and them isn’t that they know something you don’t. It’s that they’ve made peace with the discomfort of stating a price and letting the client decide if it works for them. You’re still trying to read minds, predict reactions, and protect yourself from rejection by charging less than you need to.
Why Market Research Won’t Save You
Looking at what other people charge feels like due diligence. It feels responsible. You’re being smart, doing your research, making an informed decision. Except all you’re really doing is finding reasons to doubt yourself.
Because competitor pricing tells you absolutely nothing useful. The person charging £30 an hour might be desperate for work, under qualified, or running their business as a side hobby. The person charging £300 might have twenty years of experience, a killer reputation, or just be really good at selling themselves. You have no context for any of these numbers. You don’t know their overhead costs, their target market, their business model, or how booked they actually are.
What you do when you look at competitor pricing is this: you find the lowest price and think “well I can’t charge less than that, I’d be working for free.” Then you find the highest price and think “I definitely can’t charge that much, I’m not that good.” So you land somewhere in the middle and call it competitive pricing. But middle-of-the-road pricing attracts middle-of-the-road clients who are shopping around for the best deal. Is that who you want to work with?
The other thing that happens when you base your pricing on competitors is you end up in a race to the bottom. Someone undercuts you, so you drop your prices to stay competitive. Then someone undercuts them. Before you know it, everyone’s working for poverty wages and wondering why their industry doesn’t value quality anymore. Except the industry’s fine. You’ve just trained clients to expect cheap work.
The Maths You’re Probably Getting Wrong
Most people do the basic calculation wrong anyway. They think about pricing like this: “I need to make £40,000 a year. There are about 2,000 working hours in a year. So I should charge £20 an hour.”
Except you’re not billing 2,000 hours a year. You’re not even billing half that if you’re honest about it. Because running a business isn’t just doing client work. It’s marketing, admin, proposals, invoicing, chasing payments, updating your website, networking, dealing with software that’s stopped working for no apparent reason. All of that is work, but none of it’s billable.
If you’re lucky, maybe 1,000 of those 2,000 hours are actually billable client work. Which means you need to charge £40 an hour just to hit that £40,000 target. But that’s before tax. Before business expenses. Before you factor in that you need to actually save something and have a life outside of work. Realistically, you probably need to be charging £60-80 an hour minimum just to run a sustainable business.
But most people don’t do that calculation. They just pick a number that feels reasonable, work backwards to justify it, and then wonder why they’re constantly stressed about money despite being fully booked.
What Value-Based Pricing Actually Means
Everyone tells you to charge based on value, not time. Charge for the outcome, not the hours. Price based on what it’s worth to the client, not what it costs you to deliver.
That all sounds great in theory. But what does it actually mean when you’re staring at an email trying to quote for a website redesign?
Here’s a practical way to think about it. If you’re redesigning a website for a business that makes £500,000 a year, and your new website is going to improve their conversion rate by even 2%, that’s an extra £10,000 in revenue for them. Your £3,000 fee suddenly looks like a bargain, doesn’t it? They’re making back triple your fee in additional revenue.
But if you’re thinking about pricing from an hourly rate perspective, you’re probably calculating how many hours the website will take you and multiplying by £50 or whatever you think is reasonable. Let’s say it takes you 40 hours. That’s £2,000. You’ve just left £1,000 on the table because you priced based on your time instead of their result.
Value-based pricing sounds complicated, but it’s really just this: figure out what the work is worth to the person buying it, not what it costs you to do it. If your work is going to save them money, make them money, save them time, or solve a problem that’s costing them sleep, it’s worth more than the hours you put in.
The reason this is hard is because it requires you to have a conversation about impact instead of just sending over a price list. It means asking questions about their business, their goals, what success looks like for them. Most people skip that bit because talking about value feels uncomfortably close to selling, and we’re all terrified of coming across as pushy.
Why You Keep Dropping Your Price Before Anyone Asks
There’s this thing that happens when you’re about to quote someone. You’ve done the work to figure out what you should charge. You’ve got a number in your head. Let’s say it’s £2,000 for the project.
Then you start typing the email and something in your brain goes: “But what if they can’t afford that? What if they think I’m expensive? What if they’ve got quotes from other people for way less?”
So you hedge. You write something like: “For a project like this, I’d normally charge around £2,000, but I could potentially do it for £1,500 if that works better for your budget.”
You’ve just given them a £500 discount they didn’t ask for. They hadn’t even responded to the £2,000 yet. For all you know, £2,000 was perfectly within their budget. Maybe they were expecting to pay £3,000. But you made the decision for them that they couldn’t afford your full rate.
This happens because you’re trying to avoid rejection. If you quote £2,000 and they say no, that feels personal. It feels like they’ve looked at your work and decided it’s not worth it. But if you give them a pre-emptive discount and they say yes, you’ve protected yourself from that rejection. Never mind that you’ve just cost yourself £500.
The uncomfortable truth is that when you drop your price before anyone asks, you’re not being flexible or helpful. You’re being scared. And that fear is expensive.
What Happens When You Finally Pick a Number and Stick With It
At some point, you have to just decide. Pick a number that’s based on what you need to earn, what the market will bear, and what the work is worth. Then say that number to clients without apologising, without hedging, without offering alternatives before they ask.
The first time you do this, it will feel awful. You’ll quote £100 an hour or £3,000 for a project and your heart will be racing while you wait for their response. You’ll be convinced you’ve just priced yourself out of the work.
Then one of two things happens. Either they say yes, in which case you realize you could probably have charged more. Or they say it’s outside their budget, in which case you have a conversation about adjusting scope or you part ways professionally and find a client who can afford you.
What almost never happens is the scenario you’ve built up in your head where they laugh at you, tell everyone you’re a rip-off, and your business collapses because you dared to charge a fair rate.
Most people find that when they finally commit to a price and stop second-guessing themselves, clients respond to that confidence. There’s something about stating a price clearly and then shutting up that makes people take you seriously. When you’re apologetic about pricing, defensive about your rates, or offering discounts before anyone asks, you signal that your prices are negotiable and your value is questionable.
The Real Answer to “What Should I Charge?”
You should charge enough to run a sustainable business. That means covering your costs, paying yourself a living wage, having some profit margin for reinvestment and savings, and not working yourself into the ground for poverty pay.
For most UK service providers, that’s probably somewhere between £60-150 an hour depending on your industry, experience, and target market. If you’re established and good at what you do, it’s probably closer to the upper end of that range. If you’re newer but solving expensive problems for businesses, it might be even higher.
But the exact number matters less than you think. What matters is that you pick a number you can say confidently, you quote it without apologizing, and you’re willing to let clients walk away if it doesn’t fit their budget.
Because here’s what nobody tells you: the clients who are the best fit for your business are the ones who can afford your real rates and see the value in paying them. Everyone else is just keeping you busy while you stay broke.
The question isn’t really “what should I charge?” The question is “am I willing to charge what I’m worth and deal with the discomfort of some people saying no?”
Once you can answer yes to that, the pricing bit sorts itself out.
