Why Do I Charge for a Second Opinion?

Why do I charge for a second opinion?

Because the free version was worse for everyone, including the person asking. When I reviewed someone else's website for nothing, I gave them forty minutes of impressions. When I charge for it, I give them a written assessment I am accountable for, and they get something they can act on or show to their team.

This took me longer to work out than it should have. For the first few years I treated a quick look as goodwill, and I was busy enough to afford it.

What follows is why I stopped, how I scope the work now, and when I still say no.

What is a second opinion, in my practice?

It is a fixed scope review of work somebody else built or is proposing to build. Usually a website, an SEO plan, a quote from another agency, or an automation they inherited. The client does not want me to take the project over. They want to know whether what they have is reasonable.

The request almost always arrives in the same shape. Someone has spent money, something feels wrong, and they do not trust their own judgement because they are not a specialist. That is a real problem and it is worth solving properly.

What it is not is a sales call with extra steps. If I go in looking for a reason to pitch a rebuild, I am not giving a second opinion, I am giving a proposal, and the client can tell the difference immediately.

Why did I used to do it for free?

Because it felt generous, and because I assumed it would lead to work. Both of those were half true in a way that made the mistake hard to see. It was generous, it did occasionally lead to work, and it was still the wrong structure.

The trouble with a free review is that it has no defined end. I would spend an hour looking, write a few paragraphs, get follow up questions, answer those, and then get asked about something adjacent. There was no point at which the work was finished, because nothing had defined what finished meant.

The second problem was quality. Unpaid work gets the attention that is left over, which means I was giving opinions faster than I would have wanted to stand behind them. That is not generosity. That is a risk I was transferring to the person who trusted me.

What changed my mind?

A pattern I could not ignore. The free reviews were consistently acted on less than the paid ones, and I do not think that is a coincidence. When something costs nothing, it goes into the maybe pile with everything else that cost nothing.

There was also a credibility effect I did not expect. A written review with a fee attached gets taken to the client's own team and treated as evidence. The same words in an email from someone who looked for free get treated as an opinion, because that is exactly how they arrived.

The version I am least proud of is simpler. I gave a free opinion once that was not careful enough, and it was wrong in a way that cost the person time. Nobody was owed anything, and that is precisely the problem. I would rather be owing someone a standard of work than not.

How do I price it?

As a fixed fee, decided before the work starts and sized to the scope. I publish that I work on fixed fees and that most of my projects run between one thousand and ten thousand dollars, and a review is scoped the same way as anything else. The number is agreed in writing before I open a single tab.

I will not quote an hourly rate for this, and the reason matters. An hourly review rewards me for taking longer, and the whole value of a second opinion is the compression, the fact that someone who has seen this problem many times can get to the answer quickly. Charging by the hour prices that experience backwards. I set out the full argument in why I charge fixed fees rather than hourly.

The scope line that does the most work is the one naming what is out of scope. A review is not an implementation, not a redesign, and not an ongoing advisory relationship, and writing that down means nobody has to be disappointed later.

What does the client actually get?

A written document, not a call. The call is useful afterwards, but the deliverable has to be something that exists when I am no longer in the room, because the person who needs convincing is usually not the person who hired me.

The structure is always the same. What I looked at, what is working, what is not, what I would do about it in priority order, and what I deliberately did not assess. That last section is the one people comment on most, because it tells them the boundaries of what they just bought.

I also include what I would need to see to be more certain. A review done from the outside has real limits, and saying which conclusions are confident and which are provisional is the difference between advice and a verdict.

When do I say no?

When the person wants ammunition rather than an assessment. It is usually visible in the first email, phrased as a request to confirm something they already believe about their current vendor. That is not a review, that is a favour with a fee attached, and it ends badly for everyone.

I also decline when the real question is a personnel problem in disguise. If somebody wants a technical document to justify a decision they have already taken about a person, I am the wrong instrument, and no amount of care in the writing changes that.

There is a practical screen that catches most of these before they start. I have written about the client red flag I screen for in the first email, and it applies to review requests more than to any other kind of enquiry I get.

How do I handle telling someone their vendor did fine?

Plainly, early, and without softening it into a list of minor criticisms. This is the outcome nobody plans for, and it happens more than you would think. Sometimes the site is fine, the plan is reasonable, and the real issue is a communication problem between the client and the person doing the work.

Saying so directly is the most valuable thing I can do in that situation, even though it is the conclusion least likely to lead to more work for me. If I am willing to be paid for an opinion, I have to be willing for the opinion to be that everything is broadly correct.

When it is a relationship problem rather than a work problem, I say that too. Whether to continue with a vendor is a separate decision from whether their work is good, and it is worth making both decisions on their own terms, which is the argument I made in when to end a client relationship.

Does this actually lead to more work?

Sometimes, and I have stopped optimising for it. The engagements that turn into projects tend to be the ones where I was most willing to say the existing work was acceptable, which is the opposite of what a sales strategy would predict.

What it reliably produces is referrals. Someone who paid for an honest assessment and got one tells other people, and over six years and more than seventy projects that has been a steadier source of good clients than anything I have deliberately marketed.

The version of this that fails is charging for a review and then writing a proposal wearing a review's clothing. People notice, they do not say anything, and they do not come back. Running a small practice from Bengaluru for clients elsewhere in the world, reputation is the only distribution I have.

What should you do next?

If you give away quick opinions in your own business, put a price and a page count on the next one. Not to make money from it, but to find out whether the person actually wants the answer. You will learn something either way, and quickly.

If you are on the other side of this and considering paying someone to review work you have already bought, ask them one question first: what will you tell me if the work turns out to be fine. The answer tells you whether you are buying an assessment or a pitch.

I have written more than 350 articles about this kind of work and this is the lesson I would keep if I could keep only one. Charge for the opinion, then earn it. If you want a second opinion on a site, a plan, or an automation you have inherited, reach out and let's chat about the scope.