Pricing Your Work: How to Value Your Work as a Freelancer

Peggy Dean's class attacks a question that freezes a lot of working artists: what do I actually charge? Rather than staying abstract, it spends most of its 33 minutes on specific numbers and a couple of repeatable formulas, which is what makes it useful for a beginner instead of merely comforting.

The core method: stop quoting hourly

The class opens with a clear instruction: never tell a client your hourly rate. The reasoning is practical, not moralistic. A client hearing "I charge $45 an hour" has no way to judge the total cost and starts wondering if you will work slowly on purpose. The fix is to do the hourly math privately, then convert it into one flat estimate. The walkthrough is concrete: a project estimated at 20 hours, a $45 hourly value, plus $50 in materials, lands at $1,310, rounded to $1,300. From there the class covers a 50% deposit before any work begins, watermarking and low-res drafts until final payment, and a rule of honesty if the job actually takes less time than quoted. This section is the backbone of the class and it holds up. It gives a beginner an actual formula to run instead of a feeling to chase.

The benchmark numbers are the most quotable part of the course. Never below $25 an hour even as a total beginner, $35 for hobbyists edging into paid work, $45-50 for someone a year into freelancing, and $55 or higher for a full-time professional. These are opinion, not market research, and the class says so, but having a hard floor is exactly what someone with zero reference point needs to stop underpricing out of fear.

Products, expenses, and the bigger deals

For physical products, the method shifts to competitor research: gather comparable prices, find the median, then charge slightly above it. The reasoning leans on a jeans-shopping analogy, that a suspiciously cheap price reads as low quality even when it isn't. This is paired with a monthly expenses worksheet, a specific example adding studio rent, transportation, supplies, website costs, advertising, and packaging to $597, then dividing by units sold to find a real cost floor, doubled for a minimum viable price. It is a useful reality check for anyone selling on Etsy or in bulk, even though the example numbers are illustrative rather than a template to copy directly.

The final third moves into licensing and wholesale, briefer but still concrete: a typical royalty of 6 to 8 percent, the mechanics of an advance being paid back before royalties start, and a direct warning about non-compete clauses that can quietly block other work. Wholesale gets a one-line rule of thumb, 30 to 60 percent off retail.

Where the class falls short is depth on anything beyond the formulas. There is no discussion of contracts beyond one attached licensing draft, nothing on invoicing tools, taxes, or raising prices with existing clients, and the "confidence" framing recurs often enough to feel like padding between the numbers. For a beginner needing a first price and a way to say it out loud, though, this delivers exactly that in well under an hour.

What you will learn

• ·Why quoting an hourly rate scares clients and how to convert time estimates into a single flat-fee quote instead
• ·Concrete minimum hourly benchmarks for beginner, intermediate, and professional artists ($25, $35, $45-50, $55+)
• ·How to price physical products competitively using a median-of-competitors calculation, then pricing slightly above it
• ·A monthly-expenses worksheet (studio rent, supplies, fees, packaging) that reveals your true per-item cost floor
• ·How licensing and royalty deals work, including a realistic 6-8% royalty range and the danger of non-compete clauses
• ·How to structure a deposit (50% upfront), watermark drafts, and price for different client types from individual to corporate