Posted by One of the questions that many clients ask me is: Why should I pay $100 an hour for Studio A when Studio B is offering the same for $10 an hour? While this may seem like an obvious answer for those of us in the industry, it’s a good question and an equally hard one to answer.
The Porsche of Design
In the consumer world, you often equivocate price with quality and value. While you may be willing to pay $500 for a Chevy clunker, you would never paid $50,000 for the same car. Why? Because you know that that car is not a $50,000 car. The same goes with designer clothes, electronics and about every tangible thing out there. However, web services tend to be more difficult to value. Clients often don’t understand the difference between a bad designer and a good designer; or worse a bad developer and a good developer. It’s easy to see the difference between a Chevy Cavaliar and a Porsche Turbo. Not the same online.
Is More Expensive Always Better?
Not always. You always have some overpriced clunkers. But it’s a good indication. There are many good reasons to charge $100 an hour:
- First and foremost the market bears it, and it’s actually a medium price for web services, there are firms that charge upwards of $200 an hour
- The more expensive firm most likely has better design education and principles, meaning they can turn out a better looking website, which helps your business in the long run. (I’ll explain why in a future post)
- They follow web development standards. Their code is clean, precise, validates, and works in all modern browsers. They also use SEO friendly code and make their tags accessible. (I’ll also explain why this is important in a future post)
- And frankly, in the web world, you get what you pay for. I have never seen a $500 website even come close to being what a $5,000 website is. There are always corners cut.
Still not convinced? Let’s use another example. Let’s say you need a lawyer to handle some case. Would you trust that the lawyer charging $10 an hour or $100 an hour could have the necessary skills to win your case? Or even more…would the $250 an hour lawyer be more fit to handle your case? The same goes for the web world: be it web design, web development, SEO or programming. You get what you pay for.
Post Tags: freelance
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?.If you enjoyed this post, please share it!
I like this post very much found it from your twitter. I am always glad to see someone else aside from me trying to tell people about the difference between low cost design people vs higher Value ones.
John Overall
http://www.FireDragonHosting.com
There are always exceptions to the “you get what you pay for” rule. For instance some $10 bottles of wine are high rated than $50 bottles of wine.
I also know a juice company (MonaVie) that uses the “you get what you pay for” theory to charge a lot for a poor product (because not many people know how to evaluate the product).
Ah very very true there are always exceptions to the rule, however they are of course, exceptions.
In the business of the web, you should never really trust anyone working for $10 an hour. If their services we’re as good as they were making them up to be, they’d charge at least $30 or more because that’s what the market bears them to be. Lazy Man, when fighting MonaVie please don’t hire a lawyer for $10 an hour! LOL
Keep me up to date with how that goes.