Everything you need to know about creating, pricing, and sharing your freelance pricing guide — including what to include, how to send it to potential clients, and when to use a standard guide vs. a custom proposal.
You can use this template in Canva to create your own pricing guide. You can find examples of previous Pop Club members’ pricing guides in this folder.
Okay, so you know your baseline rate. You know how to transform that into other types of rates. And you understand how to make packages. But what do you actually need to put on your own pricing guide/pricing menu?
What is a Pricing Guide?
A pricing guide, sometimes called a rates sheet or pricing menu, is simply a list of your rates and packages! Instead of sharing your prices publicly, I recommend you make a pricing guide. We’ll talk about that more in the next lesson and in the Business Setup chapter.
Rates Strategy
Some people like to make their rates strategy in a separate spreadsheet, Notion, or note if they want to offer more than just a couple of services.
It can be helpful to have a list of every service you’ve tried or want to offer with time estimates and baseline pricing potentially. Keeping a list of add-ons can be helpful too, since you won’t necessarily want to include every add-on you could offer in your menu at one time.
I keep them all within my pricing guide in Canva directly. Then, I just select the pages that are most relevant to the client I’m speaking to when I send my guide.
Before you make your pricing guide, you can head to the Packages Workbook to lay out what you want to put in your pricing guide.
Fill in the 3 services you want to offer, and then create tiers or packages for each service based on the previous two lessons. Then, list out what you’ll include with each tier. Lastly, list any add-ons you might want to include with those services.
Remember that your pricing guide can change whenever you want it to!
This is a living document that’s going to change dramatically over time. You’ll learn which add-ons work best for your clients and your services. You’ll find, with experience, which tiers will work best too.
If you’re feeling stuck about anything, go over to our shame free questions chat and ask for help! Every freelancer’s situation is unique and it’s okay if you’re feeling like you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to offer just yet.
Pricing Guides
You can create your pricing guide in Canva or directly in your CRM (if you’re using one). You should update your pricing guide every quarter (aka every 3 months) and audit your rates then, too!
Your pricing guide should include:
- Up to 3 services you offer
- Tiers or packages for each service
- What each tier, package, or service includes (how you’ll plan it with/for the client, the writing itself + estimated word count, 1-2 rounds of edits)
- Pricing for each tier and service
- Add-ons
- Logos of clients you’ve worked with (don’t worry, you can add those later when you get clients – which we’ll cover in the next chapter)
- Your contact information
- An expiration date – you don’t want leads thinking these will be your prices forever.
- Optional: Some people also like to include an About Me page at the end!
I recommend only including up to 3 services and 3 add-ons in your pricing guide.
The fewer the options, the less overwhelming it is for potential clients. This will also make you look like an authoritative specialist instead of a messy generalist.
If someone wants a service that isn’t on your pricing guide, they’ll probably ask! Then, you can send them a custom proposal for those services.
Create your client proposal or pricing guide through your CRM or Canva
What to Include:
Put each service on a separate page.
Standard
- Up to 3 services
- Up to 3 add-ons for each services
- Prices & package tiers (up to 3 tiers – ad hoc, 10% off for a package of 3-5, 15% off for 6+)
Custom:
- Project Timeline
- How the project will work (communication, collaboration, phases, meetings, etc.)
- Responsibilities // Scope of Work
- Up to 3 add ons
Optional:
- About You
- About why your services are helpful//important
- Your Process
- Links to your portfolio
The fewer the options, the less overwhelming it is for potential clients. This will also make you look like an authoritative specialist, instead of a messy generalist.
If someone wants a service that isn’t on your pricing guide, they’ll probably ask! Then, you can send them a custom proposal for those services.
You only need to make a custom proposal if their inquiry does not fit into your primary service offerings that we chose in the Rates chapter.
Publicly Sharing Your Prices:
I do not recommend sharing your prices publicly. It’s okay to contribute to things like Freelancing Females and Glassdoor’s rates and salary databases. But I caution freelancers against putting their prices on their website, LinkedIn, or other social media.
There are a few reasons for this:
- This helps deter anyone who’s price hunting (aka clients who just want to pay the lowest rate – these are usually low-quality clients)
- Providing your pricing guide helps you get a potential client's email address so you can directly communicate with them
- Each client and project is different, so you may want to have different rates or service offerings for some clients.
How to Share Your Prices:
Instead of sharing your prices publicly, I recommend you make a pricing guide. You should have created your pricing guide in the last chapter when you set your rates.
If you have a website, put up a contact form titled “Request my pricing guide!” That way, anyone who is interested in your services can give you their email and you can then communicate with them directly.
At this phase: you’ve made the first contact with the client (in an LOI or pitch). Then one of two things will happen:
- They’ll respond and express interest
- Or they’ll respond, you’ll follow up later, and they’ll express interest
Now it’s time to share your prices! Get their email if you found them on LinkedIn or another social platform. Send them a short email that includes your pricing guide, a link to your scheduler to set up a discovery call with them, and a message letting them know you’re excited to hear more about their needs.
Standard Services:
Proposals are essentially a precursor to a contract. If you’ve made contact with a potential client and the project is a standard service that you offer and include in your pricing guide, then there’s no need to create a separate proposal. Although, some CRMs, like Honeybook, include the proposal phase automatically.
So for example, this might look like: 3 blog posts for $1,000 or 5 product descriptions for $500. Basically, whichever services you chose in the Services chapter or packages you created in the Rates chapter.
Custom Proposals:
For custom proposals, you can make them in your CRM or in Canva. I personally, just use the same template as my pricing guide – I just update it for the specific client, project, and services we discussed. I also include a timeline of how long I think the project will take in proposals.
For almost all of my copywriting projects, I didn’t have a standard service that someone could choose, so I created a custom proposal for those. For example, a client comes to you asking if you can write an e-book about how to build a van from start to finish. That’s a big undertaking. So you’ll want to research what it’ll take to create before you decide to work on the project. Then you’ll want to make a plan to break the project up into smaller chunks and then a plan for how long each phase of the project will take. Then you’ll take your hourly rate and estimate a budget for the project. In general, it’s wise to give yourself a 5-10 hour buffer.
For larger copywriting projects, you’ll want to make it clear that the proposal is only an estimate right upfront. That way, if you do go over the time you thought it would take or the project scope changes, your client won’t be surprised when you charge more.
For retainer clients, a proposal usually is just to break down of what will be included in the standard monthly fee that you plan to charge them and what additional services you can offer for an extra charge if they’d like.
So for my most recent retainer client, I made a list of responsibilities based on what they were looking for. I also included my hourly rate and my standard monthly retainer rate. I listed the office hours during which I planned to work on their project and how we could communicate.
You don’t need to offer office hours for any of your clients, but I prefer to because it keeps the project inside the scope and keeps me on track to maintain my work/life balance.
Lastly, in the proposal, I included a few additional services that they could add on like extra meetings, referrals to other freelancers for a small fee, and interviews with their staff for the content I was creating with them.
So the gist is: create a pricing guide with your standard packages and services. Have this ready to go as a PDF for potential clients. When a potential client expresses interest in your services, ask them if you can send them your pricing guide and portfolio. Then, you can get their email to send it.