Copywriting rate for SaaS project? 120 pages, 500-700 words each

I've been asked to send a proposal for the rewrite of 120 web pages with copy on each of 500-700 words for a SaaS company. It's for a new software they're getting ready to launch.

While I've created many detailed proposals, I've never done one to this magnitude and I'm curious how much I should propose as my fee. While I normally charge at a project rate and not hourly, I figure that my hourly rate is generally about 130-140/hour if I was to break it down.

I'm thinking this is easily a 5 figure project. Whether that's in the low-5 figures or mid-5 figures or somewhere in-between is where I'm struggling when I put the numbers in.

They've got content there but it was written by technical people and developers, so it's loaded with grammatical and spelling errors, let alone there is no flow and consistency. The content is basically there but to any copywriting expert's opinion, including my own, it needs a full rewrite if they want to do it properly, considering they're talking to various BDMs (Business Decision Managers) throughout the world.

I'm giving them two options:

Either I rewrite everything professionally

or

I go through the existing material and fix all of the spelling and grammatical errors and at least will ensure that it flows properly.

I'm just looking for feedback here on what others would charge for something like this. I've promised to get them a detailed and structured proposal to them soon. They will then present it to their board next week with their recommendation. While I want this steady gig, I don't want to short change myself either.

This is not their first SaaS service that they're launching but it is the first time that they're looking to use a professional copywriter to help them with their story and messaging.

So, what should I charge for each of those two options above in your professional opinions?

 

Those options are pretty decent ones. For pricing, if I were to propose, I would probably look at higher 4 figure to lower 5 figure amount as irrespective of your options, there would still be a lot of existing stuff you can reuse with a little tweaking.

If you have do not have enough knowledge about what you plan on writing, you can probably quote a little higher because of additional effort required for research.

Let me know how it went.

 

Thanks for justifying my thinking behind it. Appreciate that. My thing was I didn't have any idea of their business model or how much funding they have when it comes to those kinds of SaaS operations.

But yeah, I never heard back from him after putting together a seven-page detailed proposal. Crappy situation, but as you know so much of any project goes into the proposal. Will send my final follow up email to him this week, which I'm 99.99999% certain I won't hear back from. This one's over and done with, he likely picked up a non-native speaker on freelancer or fiverr who will do a dump job for peanuts.

No regrets from my end, I don't compete with that stuff as my experience, background and majority of my work is with Fortune 500 global brands. It would have been a nice piece of income coming in if he bit, but like said I have no regrets. I wasn't taking something like that on for scrap fee. While I don't charge hourly rates, i have a good idea of what my hourly rate comes to and when I pieced it all together, I knew how long that project was going to take me whichever option he would have selected. I stand by what I quoted him.