Client: "Send me bigger bills that I can ignore"
Category: Just Plain Silly...
Posted Wednesday, April 04, 2007 at 09:02 AM [GMT-6]

You know, you really should raise your rates a bit. You are selling yourself way short for the services you are performing.

Quick quiz. The source of the preceding statement is:

As a punchline in the "Big Book of Freelance Website Design Jokes"

That hazy world of early morning REM sleep just before the alarm ruins a perfectly fine dream

An actual client email in response to receipt of a bill for website maintenance.

If you chose the third option, you're obviously delusional -- but you're also correct.

I responded to this amazing observation...

Thanks for your concern about my fees. However, you may be overestimating the time it takes to perform a lot of the maintenance work that I do. The updates you requested below, for example, took all of two minutes to complete. Even if I raised my rates 50% that would still work out to a whopping $2.

I've seen folks do thirty minutes worth of work and charge $100 just because the client couldn't do the work for himself, and while he may be willing to pay, I have a hard time believing that any webwork is worth $200 an hour.

But my client wasn't finished...

Hey, remember it's your expertise that matters, not just the amount of time you spend. Our doctors can do a cataract surgery in 4 minutes, but patients pay because they're the best! I still think you should raise your rates.

I've said all along that web design isn't brain surgery; maybe I'm using the wrong medical comparison. Plus, I thought we were paying for malpractice insurance, not expertise.

What's the point of sharing this? Only that I had to send a second notice a month later. I guess my first invoice was too small to take seriously.*

*In the client's defense, I learned that family business had intervened shortly after my invoice arrived, and it got lost in the shuffle. I understand completely. I simply found the whole situation amusing and ironic.