Ask ten web agencies what they charge for a brochure site and you will get ten numbers spread across an order of magnitude. Ask them how they arrived at the number and most will describe a feeling: what the last client paid, what felt defensible, what the competitor down the road seems to charge.
That is not pricing. That is negotiating with yourself before the client has said anything. Here is the arithmetic instead.
Start from capacity, not from the market
You do not have 260 working days a year. After holiday, illness, admin, sales calls, invoicing and the afternoon lost to a hosting migration, a realistic figure for billable delivery is closer to 160 days for a working owner. If you have never measured it, assume you are optimistic by about a third.
Take the revenue you need — salaries, software, rent, tax, and the profit that makes the whole thing worth doing — and divide it by those 160 days. That number is the floor. Anything below it is subsidised by you.
Agencies are routinely shocked by this figure the first time they calculate it. That shock is the point. It is the gap between what you charge and what you need, and it has been there the whole time.
Why day rates quietly lose you money
A day rate prices your time. The client is not buying your time; they are buying a site that brings them work. Those two things have wildly different values, and the gap between them is your margin.
The practical problem with day rates is that they punish you for getting better. Build the same booking flow for the fifth time and you will do it in half the days you did the first — so under a day rate, five years of hard-won expertise earns you less money for the same outcome. Fixed pricing on a defined scope inverts that: the faster you get, the more you make.
Day rates do have a place: genuinely open-ended work where the scope cannot be known in advance, like an ongoing retainer or an exploratory phase. The mistake is using them for a project with a clear finish line.
Always quote three options
A single price is a yes-or-no question, and the answer to a yes-or-no question is frequently no. Three options change the conversation from "should I buy this?" to "which of these should I buy?".
- A lean option that solves the stated problem and nothing else. Cheaper than they expect, and it should be genuinely viable — a straw man is obvious and costs you credibility.
- The one you actually recommend, priced at your real number, scoped to what you would build if it were your own business.
- An expanded option with the things they mentioned wanting "eventually". Some clients take it. The ones who do not now know what the ceiling looks like.
The middle option is chosen most often, which is exactly why it should be the one you want to build rather than the one that merely splits the difference.
Take a deposit, always
Fifty per cent up front, the balance on launch. Not because you expect to be cheated, but because a client who has paid nothing has not yet decided to do the project — they have decided to think about it while you start work.
The deposit is also the cleanest filter you have. Someone who queries a standard deposit at the start will query every invoice after it, and the project has told you what it is going to be like before you have written any code.
How to raise your prices without losing everyone
Raise them on the next new enquiry, not on your existing clients. New clients have no reference point; existing ones have a number in their head and a relationship with it.
Then watch the win rate. If you are still winning more than about two thirds of the work you quote for, your prices are too low — a high win rate means you are the cheap option, not the obvious one. The uncomfortable truth is that a healthy agency loses a fair share of pitches on price and keeps the ones where price was not the deciding factor.
If nobody ever tells you that you are too expensive, you are too cheap.