What Should a Freelancer Stop Charging For?

What should a freelancer stop charging for?

The first conversation, and almost nothing else. Over six years and more than 70 projects I have given away a lot of things for a lot of bad reasons, and the only one that consistently paid me back was making the initial conversation free and genuinely useful. Everything else I gave away, I eventually had to take back.

That is an awkward thing to publish, because the usual version of this article is a confident list of boundaries written by someone who sounds like they always had them. I did not. I arrived at these lines by crossing them.

The distinction I eventually landed on is simple to state and hard to apply. Some unbilled work buys you better clients. Some of it just leaks. The whole job is telling them apart before the invoice, not after.

Why did I stop charging for the first conversation?

Because charging for it was solving the wrong problem. I had assumed the risk was people extracting free advice, so I put a gate in front of it. What actually happened is that the gate filtered out serious buyers who were not yet sure I was the right person, which is a completely reasonable thing for a serious buyer to be.

The people who extract free advice are not stopped by a fee anyway. They are stopped by a conversation that stays at the level of diagnosis rather than instruction, which is a skill rather than a policy. You can be completely open about what is wrong with someone's site without handing over the eight hours of work required to fix it.

There is also a selfish reason, and I would rather say it than pretend otherwise. That first conversation is how I find out whether I want the project. Charging for it makes me feel obliged to take work I have already been paid to evaluate, and obligation is a terrible basis for choosing a client.

What about small edits after launch?

This is where I leaked for years, and it is the most common version of the problem. A project finishes, the client sends a small change, it takes twenty minutes, and billing for twenty minutes feels petty. So you do it. Then the next one arrives.

The trouble is not any individual edit. It is that unbilled work creates an expectation of unbilled work, and expectations are much harder to reset than rates are. Six months later you are doing an unpaid afternoon a month for a client who genuinely believes this is the arrangement, because from their side it always has been.

What I do now is put a defined window in the agreement, so that a period of small changes after launch is included on purpose rather than by drift. After that window, changes are either quoted or they are on a retainer. The client is not surprised, because it was part of the deal from the start, and I am not resentful, which turns out to matter more than the money.

Does giving something away devalue it?

Sometimes, and the deciding factor is whether the thing you give away is the thing you sell. A free conversation does not devalue paid delivery, because they are different goods. A free audit absolutely devalues a paid audit, because it is the same good with the price removed.

That line is worth sitting with, because it explains a lot of pricing confusion in service businesses. People are told generously that giving value away builds trust, and they respond by giving away their actual product, then wonder why nobody buys it. The advice was not wrong. It was imprecise about which value.

Writing is the clearest example of the good version. I have published more than 350 articles on answer engines, schema, and E-E-A-T, all free, and none of it competes with what clients pay me for. The article explains what should happen. The engagement is somebody actually doing it, in their specific situation, with their constraints, and being accountable for the result.

What did I start charging for instead?

Diagnosis, when it goes deeper than a conversation. There is a real difference between telling someone on a call that their category pages are competing with each other, and spending a day working out exactly which pages, in what order, with what fix and what expected effect. The first is a generous answer. The second is work.

Drawing that line let me stop rationing my openness, which I had not realised I was doing. When the paid thing is clearly defined, you can be far more forthcoming in the free part, because you are no longer worried that every useful sentence is a leak. That made the free conversations better, which made the qualified ones more likely to convert.

I have written separately about charging a discovery fee before quoting a build, and that is the same principle applied earlier in the process. Charge for the work of finding out. Do not charge for the willingness to talk.

How do you tell the difference between generosity and leakage?

Ask what it buys. Generosity has a return you can name, even a fuzzy one: better qualified conversations, a clearer brief, a client who trusts you enough to take your advice. Leakage has no answer except that it felt awkward to charge.

That awkwardness deserves its own attention, because it is doing more work than any strategy. Most unbilled work I have done was not a considered decision about relationship building. It was conflict avoidance with a business rationale attached afterwards. Naming that honestly was the single most useful thing I did about it.

The other test is repetition. A one time favour is a favour. The same favour three times is a policy you did not write down, and policies you did not write down are the ones clients discover before you do. I go into this at more length in how I handle scope creep, and the mechanism is identical.

What happens when a client expects the free thing to continue?

You have to reset it explicitly, and the reset is easier than the dread of it suggests. What does not work is quietly starting to bill for something that was previously free and hoping nobody notices, because they notice, and now the issue is trust rather than money.

What works is naming the change, giving a reason that is about your business rather than about their behaviour, and giving a date. Something close to: I have been handling these ad hoc, and from next month they will go through the retainer or be quoted. No apology, no accusation, no long explanation.

In my experience most clients accept this immediately, and the ones who push back hard were the ones the change was for. The conversation I spent weeks dreading has usually taken under two minutes, and I have never once had a good client leave over it.

Would I recommend this to someone starting out?

Mostly, with one adjustment. Early on you have less to trade on, so the free conversation is carrying more weight and you should invest more in it. What you should not do is conclude from that that everything should be free until you are established, because that is how a rate gets anchored for years.

The thing I would tell my earlier self is that fixed fees made all of this dramatically easier, and I have written about why I charge fixed fees rather than hourly. When you bill by the hour, every generous act shows up as a gap in your own timesheet, and you start counting. When the fee is fixed and the scope is written down, generosity inside the scope costs you nothing and generosity outside it is obvious to both sides.

Most of my projects land between $1,000 and $10,000, which is small enough that a few unbilled afternoons genuinely matter. At that size the discipline is not optional.

What should you do next?

Write down every unbilled thing you did in the last month, then put a reason next to each one. Anything where the reason is a named return, keep doing on purpose. Anything where the reason is that it felt awkward to charge, that is your list, and it is usually shorter and more embarrassing than you expect.

Then pick the single most repeated item and decide what it is: included in scope on purpose, quoted separately, or part of a retainer. One decision, written into your next agreement. That is the whole change, and it compounds quietly.

If you are in the middle of one of these conversations and want to think out loud about how to reset it without damaging a good relationship, reach out. I have had this conversation from both sides and I am happy to talk it through.