//Free tool

project pricing calculator

You know roughly how long the job will take and, if the call went well, roughly what it is worth to the client. This turns those two numbers into three options with the arithmetic showing, floored at the cost of your time so the value story can never talk you below what the year needs.

The deal

The revenue the work plausibly wins or protects over a year. Ask on the discovery call; estimate if you must, and say so in the proposal.
What the Essential version really takes, including revisions.
From the rate calculator — the rate below which your year doesn't add up.

Three options to present

Essential

$5,980

The core outcome, tightly scoped.

CompleteRecommend this

$9,980

The recommended scope — outcome plus the pieces that protect it.

Premium

$15,980

Everything in Complete, extended — more ground covered, more of it handled for them.

The math, shown:

Your floor for this scope is $3,600 (hours × rate). The Complete tier targets ~10% of the yearly value the work creates; every tier is floored at cost-of-time, and the figures are nudged off round numbers — a price like $9,980 reads as calculated, not guessed.

Where the numbers come from

The middle option is set at about a tenth of the yearly value you entered, which is the share Dan Mall publishes as his own starting point. The first option trims to the core outcome; the third extends the scope. Every option is floored at your cost of time, because a method that lowers your price was never the point. If you do not know your floor, work it out first; it takes two minutes. The part the calculator cannot do, getting a real figure out of a real client, is the whole of the longest thing on the blog.

Common questions

How does pricing a project by value work?
The price is derived from what the finished work is worth to the client rather than from the hours it takes you, so getting faster stops cutting your pay. In practice it is a conversation before it is a sum: you get a figure the client already believes about their own business, then quote a share of it. Dan Mall publishes his share, ten per cent, and says it to the buyer out loud as a nine-times return. Your cost of time becomes the line you will not go below rather than the price itself.
Why three options rather than one price?
One number asks a yes-or-no question and the answer to those is often silence. Three genuinely different amounts of work turn the decision into which, and the buyer stays in control of how much of you to hire. The condition is that each option is a job you would be glad to do; an option built only to make another look reasonable is a decoy, and buyers spot those.
What if a tenth of the value is less than my time costs?
The calculator will tell you, and it is information rather than a bug. Either the value is bigger than the client has admitted, which means a better question on the next call; or the scope is heavier than the outcome justifies and should be cut; or the job can only ever pay floor rates. Price at the floor or reshape the work. Never price below the floor to make the value story tidy.
Why does it not give round numbers?
It rounds to the nearest ten and steps off exact hundreds. That habit comes from an older piece of advice, that a non-round figure reads as calculated, which we have since retired in public because it became a tic. A price is credible because its reasoning is visible, not because of its last digit. Round the result if you prefer; nothing about the method depends on it.