Nobody wants a website, an audit, or a campaign. They want more customers, fewer refunds, less time on a task they hate, or the ability to stop worrying about something. Price follows the size of that result, not the difficulty of the work.
The same work, two framings
Effort framing: 40 hours of development at $120/hr = $4,800
Value framing: Recovering ~$8,000/month of abandoned checkouts
Same work. The second framing supports a fee the first cannot.
Find the number in the discovery call
- "What does this cost you today, roughly, per month?"
- "If this were fixed, what changes for the business?"
- "What have you already tried, and what did that cost?"
- "Who else feels this problem, and how loudly?"
You will not always get a clean number, and you should not fake one. But asking changes what the negotiation is about, and a buyer who cannot estimate the cost of the problem is telling you something useful about whether they will pay to solve it.
A practical anchor: aim for a fee somewhere around a tenth to a third of the first-year value you can credibly claim. Below that you are leaving money behind; far above it and the case becomes hard to make honestly.
Try it
For your most common service, write the one-year value it creates for a typical client, with the arithmetic behind it. If you cannot show the arithmetic, you are not ready to charge on value — go get the number from your next three clients.