Most freelance pricing happens in the wrong place. It happens out loud, at the end of a call, when somebody asks "so roughly what are we talking?" and you say a number you have not derived, with a "ish" on the end that tells them it is negotiable. The proposal then has the job of making that number look considered, which it was not.
North moves the pricing to the document, where it can be built rather than blurted.
Three amounts of work, not three costumes
The draft carries three options. The rule underneath them is that each has to be a different amount of work, and the test is whether you can say in one sentence what the top option does that the middle one does not. If you cannot, you have the same job in three outfits, and buyers can tell.
So the options build on each other by scope. The first is the defined core. The second adds named services (a usage sheet, a launch page, the packaging direction). The third adds more. They are named by their shape, not by rank, because "Basic" tells the smallest buyer they are choosing the bad version, and a client who feels that way does not choose at all.
Inside each option the scope is written to be counted against. Five templates. Two rounds. Three formats. A quantity turns a later "can we get a few more?" into arithmetic instead of an argument, and the arithmetic is the change order.
The sentence under every figure
Each option carries a rationale: three sentences at most, in plain language, that name which parts of the scope the number rests on. "Brand identity and the launch page are where this option earns its number." If a reader cannot underline the scope groups inside the defence, it is a description rather than a defence, and the draft is written so that they can.
What the rationale never does is decompose the craft into units. No per-page rates, no per-hour figures, no "eight hours of concepting at". Craft is priced whole. The only dollar figure a defence may carry is the option's own total.
Where the client told you what the outcome is worth (a new wholesale account is about nine thousand a year, say, and they are adding four or five), that figure goes into the document as the client's own number, and the price sits against it so they can do the division themselves. Where they did not, the price is defended on the scope. Both are honest. Only one of them gets you the bigger project, which is why the conversation that gets a figure out of a client is the longest thing on the blog.
Two things it prices that most people absorb
Rush. If the deadline in your notes compresses the work well below a normal lead time, the draft prices the compression as a priority-scheduling premium and frames it as buying the front of the queue, never as a penalty. Most freelancers eat rush work for free and resent it. The draft does not.
The tempting low number. If your own rate, or the budget hint the client dropped, looks low for the scope you described, the draft does not quietly produce small figures to match. It writes stronger options and defends them, and leaves you to decide whether to come down. Coming down is always available. Talking yourself up after a low anchor almost never is.
What stays yours
North never sets a price. It recommends one, shows its reasoning, and waits. You can change every figure, every name, every sentence of every rationale before the document exists anywhere outside your editor. If a client pushes back at midnight, nothing negotiates on your behalf; the reply is yours in the morning.
And it never compares you to anyone. No peer rates, no regional averages, no "designers at your level". It has no such data, and neither, when we went looking, did most of the pages that publish it.
Where it stops
It cannot extract a value figure from a client who did not give one, and it will not invent one. It does not know your floor, the rate below which your year does not add up; the rate calculator does that arithmetic in two minutes and you should carry the result into every quote. And for open-ended, exploratory work where nobody can see the shape yet, a day rate is often the right unit and a three-option proposal is the wrong document. Say so in the notes and the draft will follow you.
Common questions
- Does North tell me what other freelancers charge?
- No, and it will not pretend to. It has no data on anyone else's rates, and the confident tables you see elsewhere mostly failed when we checked them. The price it drafts comes from two places only: the scope it wrote, and whatever the client told you the work is worth. A benchmark invented to make a page feel authoritative is the thing this product is built against.
- What if the client never said what the work is worth to them?
- Then the options are priced from the scope, and the defence of each price rests on what the option contains rather than on a return figure. That is the floor of value pricing rather than its failure, and it still beats hourly on defined creative work. The questions that get a real figure out of a client are on the blog; North cannot ask them for you.
- Can I change the numbers?
- Every one of them, before anything is sent, in the same editor the draft lands in. North recommends and defends; it never sets a price. If you halve the middle option, its rationale will no longer match, and the draft will not stop you, so read the defence again after you edit the figure.