How To Price Your Design Services In 15 Mins
In this 15‑minute talk, Charles Postiaux walks designers through a spectrum of pricing models, from ultra‑cheap, volume‑driven services to high‑ticket, outcome‑focused engagements. He explains why cheap pricing works (low client risk, easy acquisition, simple repeatable processes, offshore delegation) and how to structure it (e.g., $100/month subscriptions, systematic deliverables, strong SOPs). He then contrasts the expensive side, highlighting the need for proof, longer sales cycles, higher standards, and positioning the service as an investment or commission on the client’s revenue. Postiaux introduces a hybrid “custom price” approach that mixes price, speed, guarantees, and ease to create flexible tiers. He gives two concrete actions: identify one’s unique skill set and build a repeatable process, and market oneself relentlessly (ads, platform experiments, content formats). Throughout, he stresses patience and consistency, noting that results compound over months or years regardless of the chosen pricing path.
Chapters
There are over 140,000 design agencies around the world and probably millions of designers. And so I'm going to try to give you some ideas on where to place yourself, how to go from cheap to expensive. Then I'm going to give you some key actions that you can focus on so that you can achieve whatever goal you want to achieve with your pricing. First of all, you can make money. Like there are designers throughout the whole spectrum who make money, very cheap, very expensive designers, and they still make money. It's not so much about finding the secret formula or finding a future-proof pricing model. It's figuring out what price better match your specific set of skills and how to frame it in a way that's going to give you the biggest return on your time and on money. First of all, let's start with cheap. So when you're very cheap, there are a couple of benefits that come out of it. First, it's less risky for clients, which makes sense, right? It's very cheap, so I don't have to spend so much money, and even if it doesn't work out, I'm not losing so much. So for them, it's easier to give it a try even if they don't know you, even if you don't have a lot of proof, and it's a good way to like start getting Experience, start getting testimonials. If you don't have anybody that is willing to pay you right now, I would even argue that giving away your service for free is not a bad first move when you're starting out because this way you can exchange free value for the client and in return get testimonials, case studies, referrals, and just get experience. Speaking of that, no matter what you do, it's always good to like, you know, have proof. But I'm just explaining that compared to pricing yourself very expensively, you need a lot less of that to make it work. It's also very very easy to start for you. You don't need anything fancy. You don't even probably need a website. You just need a Google document or a Notion document. Just add what the service is about, what they're going to get, have a link to pay, and that's it. So I think that's also a great advantage. As soon as you have an idea, as soon as you start getting good at design, you just try it and just see what happens. And also the kind of last thing, which is people will buy very cheap, either expect low standards or have low standards because you spend in proportion to how much value you put into something. If you don't value design, you just think it's like a nice to have or something that you just cannot do, but that's not valuable, then you're not going to spend a lot of money. Usually that's going to mean that you also have very low standards in terms of what good design is, which is very good because it means that as a designer, you're going to spend less time on it while still making the same amount of money. And you kind of want to target those people actually. You don't want people with very high standards, very high maintenance to pay a very cheap price because you're going to spend so much time for them that it's not going to be worth it. And it's your business. If you want to fire them, just fire them. Let's deep dive into what that means if you want to go with the cheap route. What we want to do is differentiate ourselves, use price as a core part of our pitch, of our selling strategy. And so it should not be like you would say cheap is maybe $1K a month. No, what we want to do is $100 a month. We want it to be so cheap nobody churns even on their lowest month. That's the goal. How do we make something so cheap? And yet variable that people just always have it for the rest of their life. That's the strategy because you're going to make money through volume and probably only through volume. So it's not so much about 10 clients, it's more about 1,000 clients because 1,000 clients paying $100 a month is really good, but 10 clients paying $100 a month is, you know, and the key to get this to work is to have strong yet simple processes in place. That's why you need to find a pricing and deliverable system and a service that works based on what you do best and what you naturally are good at, because you're going to be able to know very well what a strong yet simple process is like. And the goal of finding a simple process is usually to remove as many things as possible that are making it hard to do. You need to remove steps to make it easy. But this way is going to be very predictable. And that's what we want. We don't want to make custom designs. We don't want to solve very specific problems. We want it to be very systematic. And that's going to also help us to delegate to offshore talents. That's a strong Next thing you can do is, first of all, you cannot have 1,000 clients and do it by yourself. You will need people to do it for you. And the only way to do it at this price is to hire offshore talents that are a lot cheaper than you or people you can hire probably around. And this way you're going to be able to do more, get more clients, because again, we want volume. And at the same time, it's going to help you get a margin out of it. The benefit also of very cheap is that it's relatively easier to sell than expensive. Services. You can just go on Google Maps in your city and just target like small shops in your city and then expand it to your region or your country. And I'm sure you can find 1,000 small businesses that are okay spending $100 a month on that. So marketing is going to be very easy. It's all about how can you deliver standard quality designs in a systematic way, taking as little time and resources as possible. That's going to be the constraint. And by the way, if you're a tech company that wants to work directly with me, You can go on my website, baobun.studio. It's my design agency and we work with companies to solve their product problems, whether it's for a discovery phase or long-term work. So if that's something that interests you, go on baobun.studio and we can talk about it together. So now the next step is expensive. So if you want to go on the expensive side of the spectrum, then there are going to be a couple of downsides, I would say, which is it's going to be riskier for the clients. It's very different to spend $100 a month versus $100,000 a month. They want proof, whether it's case studies, testimonials, content as well works. They're going to also need a longer time period to negotiate, to talk about the deal, outline the scope, define a contract. So it's a lot more time consuming than just click on this button and buy it. It's also harder for you to start because usually you would need like the website landing page that is very specific to an industry, a niche, to a style, to a goal. You need to have strong copy. You need to again have those case studies that you probably don't have in the beginning. It's not impossible, just a bit harder. And usually there comes higher standards when you work with clients like that. Actually, like Like some clients don't have very high design standards, but it's just having higher standards regarding your process, the designers maybe you work with, or just you, like the kind of work you want to give to them. That's going to require you probably to have a higher standard. But you know, there are agencies and designers that just put logos to say who they've worked with and that's enough to pitch. And that's a very strong social proof if these are well-known companies. The strategy could be for you to start cheap to get like those Case studies, those logos, and then you can just be expensive. We do this for this type of companies. Here are all of the logos. Here are all of the testimonials that we have, and that's your landing page. Again, it can just be like a Google Doc. And so what I like to do again is to be not just expensive, but very expensive because it's going to disconnect you from classic value price. Usually when you pitch average pricing or like you know in the from two k to eight k range, usually. A lot of leads, a lot of clients are going to ask. So in terms of engagement, in terms of time, how many hours do I get from this? They don't really disconnect easily how much it costs versus how much they get or how much you work on their project. It's not so much about solving a problem. It's more about how many hours can you work on it? Sometimes kind of like the problem with productized services is that's why studios and designers try to say, okay, you're going to get to design new design updates every day or every 2 days, because then it kind of becomes an employee of sorts. And it counters a little bit that it's like, well, We don't really set the amount of hours, but every day you get a new update. And so if you're very expensive, then it doesn't really work so much because then it's more about hours versus outcome. Like if you're priced $100,000 a month, people are not going to say, so how many hours is that? Because it doesn't really make sense. It's not connected to the hours, connected to what they're going to achieve out of it. It's like our conversions are really bad on the website. We need someone to fix it. Or people, our users churn very quickly. We want to optimize that. Like these kinds of problems, one can be very long to solve depending on how deep the problem is, because if it's a million-dollar problem, let's say they make $1 million out of your design service and the solution that you've brought up. If you get 10% of that, that's $100K. And in this sense, that's a really good deal. So that's the way you need to frame it. Usually we solve big problems and we take a percentage out of it, which is pretty much like a commission, which happens in sales a lot as well. And that's the way we kind of want to approach that pricing because it's not so much about you designing whatever the client wants. It's more about you designing solutions that are going to help the client make more money. Again, we want Strong and simple processes, but this time it needs to be to solve very specific problems, which you need to define an outline when you talk with the client preparing the scope of the project. And so you need to frame it as an investment. It's like you invest 100k and you make a million, and I just take 10% out of it. That's it. And again, that's why we want to be very expensive is because it's going to help us have a new definition, have a new frame to that pricing. It's not so much more about. I just design for you whatever you want me to design. It's like, this is an investment. We solve a very specific problem for your business. It's going to help you make a lot more money and we just take a percentage of it for our work. Now there's kind of like a plot twist to figure out like the best of both worlds, which is to have a custom price. So maybe you're going to have 2 pricing tiers and they like some of the first one. You like some of the second one. They like some of the third one and you're just going to make A custom offer, a custom price. And it's really good because you have your offers, they just pick whatever they prefer. It seems obvious, but it's something you need to talk about when you are on the call with the lead. And there are 4 ways to customize your price. You have the price, which is how cheap, expensive it is, and just negotiating in that. So if your price is $10,000, but they prefer $6,000, then you're like, well, I can remove those things and go down to $8,000 or go down to $9,000. The second one is speed. So how fast or slow Will you get it? Do you want to launch your product in a week, in a year? That's going to impact the timeline and that's going to impact the price. Do you have guarantees? They trust you. Do they know someone you've worked with before? Do you have very well-known logos and brands that you've worked with in the past? But it can be a guarantee. Like if you have an engagement for 4 weeks and at the beginning of the 4th week, they're not really happy with the design, they're not really convinced, then you can add a 5th week and be like, okay, I'm going to add another week free of charge for you and we're just going to make sure that you get the most out of our engagement. And that's a great addition to add. And then the ease, which is related to your processes, how easy it is to work with you or how accessible are you, right? It's like, how easy is it to communicate with you? How often do we talk? Obviously the more they pay, the more receptive and the more accessible you're going to be as well. And the cheaper they pay, the less accessible, the less responsive you're going to get. So now I have 2 tasks for you to do. The first one is to spend your time figuring out what you can uniquely do. What does that mean? It means figure out your unique set of skills. There are things you are really good at and you enjoy doing and you have a natural talent for it. And there are things that you don't enjoy doing or you don't have a talent for. For example, for me, design systems and components, I know how to do them. I do them well, but it's not something that I really enjoy doing naturally and out of fun. And just do that because what that's going to help you figure out is if you know the type of work you do, how fast you do them, how often you want to do them, what kind of clients you want to work with, then it's going to help you figure out the best offer for the best price for your target market. The 3rd benefit is it's going to help you work on that strong yet simple process. You are going to do it so often, so many times that you already know like what the process is. You just have to write it down. And if you want to delegate, if you want to just make a cheap offer, then it's going to be super easy for you to outline it. And then the next task is going to be to market yourself. As designers, we don't really like to sell, market, pitch. Sales calls and all of that, that it's not really fun, but it's the only way that people are going to know you because nobody knows you exist until you let them know you exist. And so how to do that? The easiest way I found to do that is either to make ads. That's it. Just run ads. So if you can spend as little as $10 a day on ads, Facebook, Google, that works as well, then do that. And the other way is just to show your work. So test platforms. Plus formats, which is what I'm doing right now. I'm making YouTube videos and I found a platform and a format that works for me. And I've tried a lot of things like, you know, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, blogs, ads. I've tried a lot of things, pretty much as much as I think I could do. Cold outreach, everything. And for me, what works best is YouTube and the kind of content that I'm making right now. But that's me experimenting. And you need to do the same process of you try different formats, you try Recording yourself designing, you try making a tutorial, you try, I don't know, like a time-lapse, you know, like just posting your design. There are a lot of different ways to do it, but it's super important to market yourself. And I believe that you should probably market yourself as much as you design. And even if you have clients, you should probably market yourself as much as you design. If you love designing and you're obsessed with design and you design all the time, then you need to do the same for marketing yourself. Because the thing is, in the design world, clients usually churn fast, except if you do like what I talked about with making it so cheap, people never churn. It's usually high churn, no matter what you do. You always need to be on the lookout for new clients, new leads, new business to be made. There is no way to succeed if people don't know you. Okay, my last tip to conclude this is to be patient. Even if you're doing the right things at the right time, even if you're doing everything right, it might take months, quarters, years before whatever you do compounds and gets you the results that you want. That's something I'm trying to remind myself every time. For example, I've been making videos every week almost for the past 4 months, and I've just made $15. That's like a reminder of I make content, but that's not for me today. It's mostly for me in a year or 2 years, 4 years, 5 years from now. And that's the mindset you need to keep as well. No matter the direction that you want to take, no matter how cheap or expensive you want to be, no matter how much content you put out there or ads you run, it's going to take time. And you need to stick to something, to a plan, to a path. If you do cheap, then do cheap and go all the way on that. If you want to be If you want to be expensive, then be expensive and go all the way on that. But it's going to be difficult no matter what, and it's going to take time no matter what.
