Professional Ethics: Fair Pricing For Creators

What's the actual worth of your work?

Pricing one conversation that may never cease to be relevant to creatives—both experienced and newbies. It is a conversation that often comes with some tension; you are either worried you are pricing yourself out of the market or putting your craft on the market for a price that is indeed too cheap. On the other hand, clients try to play it safe and possibly negotiate excessively to avoid being “overcharged” for a creative service.

Now, you may think that pricing is just about money. Honestly, you won’t be wrong to think so. But when we take a close look, the mechanics of pricing intertwine with ethics. Your pricing system can set assumptions for clients on what they can and should pay to get certain kinds of results. And it is not hard for this assumption to then get widespread and become a pricing yardstick for your industry at large.

Let’s talk about pricing and what fair pricing can look like as a creative.

Pricing is more than money, and it is certainly not just numbers; it is a pointer to what your time, expertise, and creative work are (or can be) worth. So while fair pricing is often thought of from the angle of giving rates that are neither too high or too low without leaving the client shortchanged on the creative work you churn out, fair pricing is really found in the relationship between 3 key elements:

• Value of your time, and cost of operations

• Value of your skill, expertise, and experience

• Value your work (potentially) creates for your client.

Pricing without factoring all three of these elements would either leave you with unsustainable rates that may be tricky to match in terms of quality of work or experience working with you, or underpricing.

What happens when you underprice?

At first thought, charging less than what you should might sound seemingly harmless, except for its effects on the creative with the charge. Right?

Wrong.

An error of underpricing can affect more people in your creative sector than you think. When you give a client a price that is “cheap” and still deliver what can be widely considered as quality work, it subconsciously sets an expectation. Your price becomes a reference point that they take into conversations and negotiations with other creatives. To them, if one person could deliver such results at this rate, then it should be an acceptable rate by other creatives in that same sector. Now imagine what would happen if multiple creators in one sector commit the error of underpricing. The average rates would drop a lot more, and clients wouldn’t be wrong to say,

“I know someone who can do it for cheaper”

And then there is overpricing.

There is a distinction between pricing above market standards based on your perception of the value you bring, and pricing based on what you think a client can afford to pay, because they are in a fix or unaware of what is attainable. Sure, we can let this slide under the guise of dynamic pricing, but in many ways, it is you taking advantage of the client. When a client realises that they have been overpriced, they go into other pricing conversations with distrust.

While it may be tricky to settle on a price for a project, here is one rule of thumb when it comes to pricing:

Let your price be reflective of the value you create and the amount of skill that goes into creating that said value.

It should not be a case of dropping prices to swipe the project from other contenders, nor should it be a case of setting a price simply because your client can afford it or is not better informed. It is about understanding the context and depth of the project, the value you bring, and the long-term value your client gets from your creative output. Truthfully, the concept of fairness in pricing can be subjective; thus, this is not a call for all creatives to charge the exact same amount for different scales of projects; it is a call for pricing that is anchored on the value of the work.