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Global term
Hourly rate
What you charge per hour of work, before expenses and tax. The simplest pricing model and usually the wrong one for senior freelancers.
An hourly rate is the easiest model to quote and the easiest model to undersell. It caps your income at hours times rate, ignores the value you create, and makes clients focus on time rather than outcome. Use hourly only for open ended discovery work, exploratory research or as a fallback when scope is genuinely unknown. For everything else, productise your service and quote a fixed price for a defined deliverable.
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