This is a post sparked by an article over at Blogsessive about cheap custom design services. It’s an interesting read with some food for thought for those of us who can’t design our own websites, but mostly this is in reply to one minuscule part of the post: pricing.
He says there is no such thing as a bargain when dealing with professional design services. I disagree.
If you take a look at MNPHoppal’s pricing scheme, for example, we do a base of $250 for a website, with copywriting, logo design, link building, and SEO costing more. A typical static-content, 10-page website with some information about the company and a sales pitch would run about $500.
I can afford to live off of this type of income because (a) I get more clients due to my bargain prices (there are more people attracted by cheap than there are put off by it) and (b) our living expenses are $450 and food. Thus, three clients a month will more than pay our living expenses, and it only takes a couple days to put together a static website like that (not including the back-and-forth of “Do you like it?”).
This is not to say an all-in-one, all-inclusive charge is a good way to do business. On the contrary, MNP Hoppal uses a sliding scale which adjusts based on the amount of work involved or how many of my skills it takes. For example, if I have a difficult client which requires a lot of customization of a pre-packaged CMS like Drupal, custom logo design in a particular format, and much back-and-forth of “do you like this?” “No,” then I’ll obviously charge them much more than the $250 base price.
Another argument against low prices is that you’re selling yourself short.
However, I tend to err on the side of lower prices, as I feel like I’m ripping off people when I overcharge for my services, as most of the work involved I learned how to do two weeks into learning PHP. Mind you the debugging skills have taken years to polish and the eye for design can only be honed through hours upon hours of scrutinizing other peoples’ websites.
