Freelance price floor: cost a project without omissions

A €2,000 quote can look comfortable when you only count the hours spent producing the work. The picture changes if the project involves several meetings, substantial preparation, specific purchases and rework you did not anticipate properly. The goal is not to turn every minute into an invoice line. It is to understand which business activities the proposed amount will fund.

Separate four concepts in your worksheet. The economic cost you use brings together the resources you choose to allocate to the project. The cost-covering threshold is the price that covers that cost under your assumptions. The proposed price also reflects your positioning, demand, alternatives and the value of your service. Finally, personal disposable income depends on your business structure, expenses, withdrawals and taxation: it cannot be read directly from the amount on a quote.

This distinction is consistent with Bpifrance Création’s principle that setting a price involves considering costs, demand and competition, rather than simply adding a percentage to an expense. Source checked on 2 November 2026. The worksheet below is a suggested working method, not an accounting standard or personalised tax advice.

Your final decision might be to sell above the threshold, reduce the scope, reconsider your organisation or decline the work. If you exceptionally accept less for a strategic reason, make the sacrifice visible and limited. Do not rename an anticipated loss an “investment” without a maximum amount, an objective and an exit condition.

Start with a consistent period, such as a full year. List the costs your business needs: software, professional insurance, equipment, telecommunications, workspace, accounting, training and other commitments you actually use. A long-lasting purchase is not necessarily treated like an ordinary monthly bill. For this management worksheet, document how you spread its cost; have the applicable accounting treatment checked separately.

Add the business cost of your target compensation, according to your circumstances. The amount you want to receive in your personal account is not necessarily the corresponding cost to the business. Have an estimate prepared for your business structure, then record both the amount and its source. Do not apply a rate found in an article to every type of business. Tax, social contributions and VAT cannot be reduced to a universal multiplier.

Put each item in just one category: the shared business budget or a direct project cost. A subscription used across all your clients may belong in the shared budget. A licence purchased exclusively for one project may be allocated to that project. Counting it in both places artificially inflates your threshold; counting it nowhere understates it.

Use a consistent tax basis suited to your situation, distinguishing genuine costs from amounts that are recoverable. Full cost, as defined by Bpifrance Création, includes the direct and indirect expenses needed for a product or service. That definition does not remove the need to adapt the items to your business. Finally, keep a “confirmed / estimated / to check” column: an empty cell is not a zero cost.

It is tempting to divide your annual budget by every working day. However, part of your week goes into finding clients, preparing proposals, running the business, learning and maintaining your tools. Those activities need funding even if no client receives an invoice line called “Monday administration”.

Build a realistic calendar instead. Start with your availability, subtract planned holidays and absences, then reserve time for work you do not sell directly. Next, estimate what you expect to sell in practice, without assuming that every remaining day will immediately find a buyer. A beginner may have plenty of available capacity but little proven demand. An established agency may have a full order book while interruptions constrain its availability.

There is no magic number of billable days here. Use your history if you have one. Otherwise, build several clearly named assumptions. For each scenario, note what would make the volume plausible: signed projects, renewal discussions, delivery capacity and known seasonality. A list of prospects is not equivalent to days sold.

Annual budget divided by saleable days gives you a reference cost per day sold, not your market rate. Also check your actual capacity before accepting work: the guide to capacity planning before taking on a new client addresses that separate question. Your cost calculation may be correct while your calendar is already full. Conversely, an empty calendar does not automatically make an excessively low price sustainable.

Now break the project into observable activities. For a web service, these might include initial analysis, content preparation, design, implementation, testing, discussions, planned revisions and handover. Adapt the list to the service you sell. The purpose is not to claim minute-by-minute accuracy, but to identify work that easily disappears behind the word “delivery”.

For each activity, write a central estimate, an assumption and a potential source of variation. “Two days of implementation if the content is final” is more useful than “two days”. If you do not know whether the content is ready, ask before calculating. You can offer a limited diagnostic stage rather than a complete fixed-fee project based on missing information.

Remember the work you do during discussions and planned rework. However, do not automatically count every day spent waiting for the client as a full working day. A delay may occupy a slot in your schedule, require you to rebuild context, or have almost no effect. Describe its actual effect and your scheduling rule rather than adding a hidden penalty.

Finally, avoid allocating general sales time a second time when it is already funded through your budget and number of saleable days. Preparation specific to this project may belong in its estimate; general prospecting should stay in your shared model. The scope should spell out limits and exclusions. An internal financial contingency does not authorise you to charge for an additional request without the client’s agreement.

A simple spreadsheet is enough. Keep assumptions beside the formulas so that someone else can understand the result, or so that you can revisit it in three months.

The suggested cost-covering threshold is C × D + E + F. This convention assumes that budget A contains the shared resources you want to fund and that E does not repeat them. If some costs vary directly with the price charged, incorporate them using an appropriate method before treating the result as complete. Do not ignore them merely because the formula is simple.

Then add three decision fields: intended price, difference from the threshold and the reason for your decision. For an unknown cost, enter “to check” and hold the decision rather than filling in zero. Date the version and retain your original estimates. Overwriting the figures after the project removes precisely the information that would help you improve.

This worksheet is deliberately an internal tool. The client needs to understand the deliverable, scope, conditions and price. You do not have to share your personal budget, other contracts or entire cost structure to explain a clear offer.

Consider an imaginary business, solely to illustrate the calculation. Its annual resources to cover are estimated at €48,000 on a consistent basis. That amount is assumed to include the relevant shared items for this fictional business, including the business cost of its owner’s compensation; it is not a recommended income or business structure. The business expects to sell 120 days. Its reference cost is therefore €400 per day sold.

One project requires three production days, half a day of preparation and half a day of discussions and planned revisions: four days in total. It incurs €180 in direct expenses that are not in the shared budget. A clearly identified uncertainty about rework justifies a €220 contingency in this example. The cost-covering threshold is 4 × 400 + 180 + 220 = €2,000.

A proposed price of €2,400 therefore leaves €400 above that threshold under these assumptions alone. This difference is neither guaranteed personal take-home income nor a certified accounting margin. Divided by the proposed price, it is approximately 16.7%; divided by the threshold, it is 20%. Always state the denominator when using a percentage, or two people may believe they are discussing the same metric while calculating different things.

Now suppose the project takes five days rather than four. With the other items unchanged, the threshold becomes €2,400. The entire anticipated difference disappears. The lesson is not that €2,400 is generally a bad price: it is that this particular fixed fee depends on a workload estimate. Before making a commitment, identify what might add a fifth day and decide how you will clarify the scope.

Your freelance price floor depends as much on the volume you sell as on the time a project requires. Return to the fictional €48,000 budget. With 100 days sold, the reference cost reaches €480. With 120, it remains €400. With 140, it is approximately €342.86. These are not three predicted performance levels: they are three assumptions to compare with your actual business.

For four working days and €400 in direct costs plus contingency, the thresholds become €2,320, €2,000 and approximately €1,771.43 respectively. The most favourable scenario should not become your baseline merely because it produces the lowest price. Ask which contracts or additional capacity would genuinely make those 140 days saleable.

Also test the project’s workload: three, four or five days, depending on the information available. Do not blend all the extremes into a reassuring average. If the decision changes as soon as one plausible assumption moves, the quote needs clearer scope or a preliminary stage. If it remains acceptable across several reasonable scenarios, you have a better understanding of which uncertainties you are accepting.

Contingency should not conceal a known problem. When a task is necessary, include it in the workload. When a purchase is confirmed, put it in direct costs. Keep contingency for identified uncertainties and check afterwards what it actually absorbed. You can then adjust your estimates without arbitrarily increasing every subsequent quote.

If your threshold is €2,000 and the client has €1,500, negotiating with your own spreadsheet first does not create any real savings. Begin by asking whether a smaller deliverable can solve a useful problem. You could reduce the number of pages, limit variations, separate content production or offer a standalone diagnostic, provided the exclusions are understandable.

Then recalculate the workload for the new scope. A 25% price reduction does not mean the work falls by 25%. Some activities cannot simply be removed: understanding the need, preparing handover or checking quality. A small project may therefore retain a substantial share of fixed costs. The new fixed fee must correspond to a genuinely different service, rather than the same promise expressed vaguely.

Financing and timing are separate questions. Instalments may help the client’s cash flow without reducing your economic cost. A longer deadline may make scheduling easier without automatically reducing the time worked. Do not confuse these arrangements with a sustainable discount. Any payment terms should be expressed and agreed within the framework applicable to your relationship.

If the project is not suitable, explain the gap simply and, where appropriate, suggest a limited alternative. The guide to analysing lost quotes without systematically cutting prices helps interpret rejections afterwards. A rejection alone does not prove that your calculation is wrong or that the client undervalues your work.

A useful internal threshold influences your prospecting. If an offer consistently requires extensive preparation for a small fee, sending more messages will not necessarily fix its economics. You could seek more consistent needs, choose a more repeatable scope or accept fewer but better-suited projects. These are commercial hypotheses to test, not guarantees of profitability.

Define observable criteria before contacting a business: the nature of its need, the result you know how to deliver, the information required and its likely compatibility with your organisation. Avoid inferring its budget from an address, industry or ageing website. Those clues can guide research; an appropriate conversation is needed to clarify a project and its constraints.

The SprintLead for freelancers page presents the product as an aid to finding and prioritising prospects. Use that commercial context to organise the accounts you want to examine, without confusing it with your accounting or a profitability calculator. Your threshold and private business data do not need to be sent to prospects.

After a few proposals, compare the needs you encounter with your offer. If relevant requests consistently exceed the planned scope, adjust the definition of the service before changing prices randomly. If contacts want a different service, reconsider your target audience. A better match between need, capacity and offer may reduce some unnecessary effort, but it never removes the need to measure your actual time.

At the end of a project, return to the original version of your worksheet. Compare planned and actual days, direct expenses and rework. Categorise differences by cause: missing information, an overly optimistic estimate, an agreed additional request, a technical incident or internal organisation. This distinction prevents you from automatically attributing every overrun to the client.

Keep measurement simple enough to maintain. You might record half-days or blocks of work by activity rather than continuously tracking every minute. What matters is using the same convention across projects and remembering discussions. A highly detailed measurement system abandoned after a week is less useful than a straightforward, consistent record.

Then choose one specific correction: add a question before quoting, define an approval more clearly, remove a rarely used option or correct the standard time for a task. Do not change five parameters at once if you want to understand what improves the estimate. Also revisit the shared budget when your commitments or capacity change, rather than only when you need to justify a price increase.

To begin today, choose a recently completed project, gather its expenses and reconstruct the workload without trying to make the result flattering. Then build the worksheet for an upcoming project with your assumptions visible. This first comparison will not certify your annual profitability, but it will already give you a better-documented decision than “this price seems right”.